By Dan Steinbock             

In the past two decades, the Netanyahu cabinets have sought to legally hammer Israeli democracy into a Jewish autocracy. In the past two years, the “judicial reforms” have been the primary instrument for the purpose. In the past two months, this effort has escalated – dramatically.

After its far-right election victory in late 2022, the Netanyahu cabinet’s newly-appointed justice minister, Yariv Levin, claimed that “judicial activism” had ruined public trust in the legal system and made it impossible for the government to rule effectively. Sensing a historical opportunity to remake the Israeli legal system, the new government would seek to “reform” Israel’s judiciary.

And so began Israel’s conservative counter-revolution.

Judicial reforms as a “political coup”

Levin’s draft proposal pushed for sweeping changes in the judiciary, executive and legislative processes and functions. It sought to change the process for choosing judges by giving the government control over the selection and dismissal of all judges, including those in the Supreme Court.

It tried to restrict the Supreme Court’s capacity to strike down laws and government decisions by requiring an enlarged panel of the court’s judges and a “special majority” in order to do so.

It would allow the Israeli parliament Knesset to overrule the Supreme Court by a majority voting against the Court, and had an “override clause” that would enable the Knesset to re-legislate laws unless all justices agreed unanimously to strike them down.

It would allow ministers to select and fire justices’ legal advisors and decide whether or not to adhere to legal advice.

It would prevent the court from using a test of “reasonableness,” which precluded the courts from hearing petitions or appeals against governmental and administrative decisions perceived as “unreasonable.”

Opposition leader Yair Lapid called Levin’s reform draft “a letter of intimidation,” contending that the Netanyahu cabinet threatened to “destroy the entire constitutional structure of the State of Israel.”

Speaking against the proposed reforms, Lapid warned of an impending “political coup.” 

From constitutional revolution…

Along with New Zealand, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom, Israel is one of few countries operating according to an uncodified constitution. In the 1950 Harari Decision following Israeli independence, the Knesset, dominated by Labor governments, opted to legislate the constitution in a piecemeal fashion.

Between the 1950s and late 1980s, it passed nine Basic Laws. Many of these laws center on individual liberties, but also on the principal state institutions and civil rights. Some were earlier protected by the Supreme Court. In particular, The Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty ensured the Supreme Court had the authority to disqualify any law contradicting it, and protection from Emergency Regulations. These rights are critical to dissidents in Israel, Israeli Arabs and civil rights in the occupied territories.

Until the proposed judicial reforms, all legislation, government orders and administrative actions of state bodies in Israel were subject to judicial review by the Supreme Court. Between 1992 and 1999 – that is, in parallel with the peace process – Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak, in a series of rulings, developed something of a doctrine, or “Constitutional Revolution,” as he called it. This transformation, he argued, came about with the adoption of the Basic Laws focused on human rights in the Knesset and by the Supreme Court.

The Constitutional Revolution elevated these laws – including the right to equality, freedom of employment and freedom of speech – to a position of normative supremacy, thus granting the courts rather than just the Supreme Court the ability to strike down legislation deemed inconsistent with the rights embodied in the Basic Laws. As the net effect, Israel morphed from a parliamentary democracy to a constitutional parliamentary democracy, in which the Basic Laws were seen as its constitution.

 … To conservative counter-revolution

Over a decade later, in parallel with the failure of the peace process, the proponents of judicial reform wanted to bury Barak’s “constitutional revolution.” Hence, the Netanyahu cabinets’ counter-revolution.

The separation between the legislative and executive branches is relatively weak in Israel since the government tends to hold a majority – however fragile – in the Knesset. Consequently, the Supreme Court is effectively the last institution having the power to limit government actions and legislation passed by a parliamentary majority. That’s why Levin and the Netanyahu cabinet hoped to shift that power from the judiciary to the government. To succeed, they first had to subvert Justice Aharon Barak’s constitutional revolution.

Due to the absence of such a constitution in Israel, the Likud governments have sought to surpass it via a body of rulings serving the same purpose. This is, in effect, a legal counter-revolution, aiming to protect the economic interests of those forces that finance Likud’s conservative leaders, the Messianic far-right and the settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories.

In this view, the proposed judicial reforms are an attempt to hammer out a Jewish democracy at the expense of secular civil rights, while turning the de facto apartheid practices in the occupied territories into a de jure rule.

Interestingly, the draft of the proposed judicial reforms came from the Misgav Institute for Zionist Strategies, a think tank with many American-Jewish members and Israeli settler hawks. As its first major project, the think tank drafted the versions of reforms first submitted to the Knesset in the 2000s.

Even more intriguingly, Misgav also advised the Israeli government on Gaza, arguing right after the Hamas offensive of October 7, 2023, that the war offered a “rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip” and ethnically cleanse Gaza.

Judicial reforms as a Jewish civil war déjà vu

After the electoral triumph of the Israeli far-right, the Netanyahu cabinet could finally begin to push the highly controversial judicial reforms in January 2023. The effort was led by Netanyahu’s deputy PM and minister of justice, Yariv Levin, and the chair of the Knesset’s constitution committee, Simcha Rothman.

Like Netanyahu, Levin is a veteran Likud politician, a scion of a far-right family. His maternal uncle was a conservative member of the first Knesset and the commander of the cargo ship Altalena. In June 1948, that ship was loaded with fighters of the far-right terrorist group Irgun and a huge cache of military equipment. A violent confrontation ensued between the newly created Israeli Defense Force (IDF) led by Ben-Gurion, and the Irgun headed by Menachem Begin’s revisionist Zionist who prioritized terror and violence.

It was a clash the revisionists never forgave and it almost unleashed a civil war between the two groups eager to take over the Jewish state.

The Levins were on the defeated Irgun’s side, and decades later Begin served as the honorary guest holding the baby, Yariv, at his circumcision ceremony. As a rising Likud star, Levin fought against Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. He opposes the creation of a Palestinian state and the two-state solution, supports settlers and believes Jews have the right to remain in all parts of the land of Israel.

Simcha Rothman is Levin’s mirror image on the side of the religious militants. He is a Knesset member of the far-right Religious Zionist Party and the chair of its constitutional committee. Born into a Jewish-American family from Cleveland, Ohio, he lived in Bnei Brak, the center of orthodox and haredi Judaism east of Tel Aviv. A critic of Netanyahu’s corruption trial, Rothman represented the militant, anti-Arab party promoting far-right Kahanism and Jewish supremacy supporting the annexation of the occupied territories to Israel. In late 2023, he called for “resettling” Gaza’s refugees; that is, for ethnic cleansing in the Strip.

When the dynamic duo, Levin and Rothman, unveiled the government plan for a legislative overhaul of the country’s judicial system, all hell broke loose.

Mass protests against judicial reforms and the apartheid system

The champions of Israel’s often-controversial policies like to say that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, discounting elections being held in countries such as Türkiye and Iran. In reality, Israel’s democracy ranking has eroded in the past decades.

According to popular democracy indices, the Middle Eastern and North African countries with highest scores feature Israel, Tunisia and Iraq. Nonetheless, given its role as an occupying state, Israel is seen as a “flawed democracy” ranking behind almost half a hundred countries and at par with Panama, Colombia and South Korea, another U.S. client state.

Israeli voters are painfully aware of Israel’s democratic erosion. The proposed judicial reforms were opposed by most Israelis in massive protests, which began soon as the cabinet introduced the reform package. Starting in Tel Aviv’s Habima Square, the site of the huge 2011 cost-of-living protests, the anti-reform demonstrations garnered some 20,000 protesters, with smaller rallies of thousands in Jerusalem and elsewhere.

Typically, the first protest was organized by “Standing Together,” a grassroots Arab-Jewish movement, though it did not address Palestinian interests. In just a week, the number of the protesters grew eight-fold to some 150,000 people while demonstrations spread in Israeli cities. By mid-March – half a year before the Gaza War – up to 260,000 people were demonstrating in Tel Aviv.

By mid-June 2023 – just four months before the Gaza War – massive nationwide protests were the new norm. In the past, Israel’s judiciary had regularly upheld policies, practices and laws that helped enforce the “system of apartheid against Palestinians,” including upholding administrative detentions, green lighting the destruction of villages and imposing restrictions on family reunification. But on some occasions, the Supreme Court had intervened to protect Palestinian rights.

With the judicial reforms, even this “slim and inconsistent” protection was expected to disappear. The proposed overhaul had chilling implications for Palestinian rights.

A month before October 7, 2023, the Supreme Court heard the case. But then, just as the protests were about to collapse the Netanyahu cabinet and result in new elections, the Hamas offensive ensued – followed by Israel’s massive retribution war.

Toward an autocratic, ethnically cleansed judiciary

Given that the far-right cabinet held a 64-seat majority in the 120-seat Knesset prior to the Gaza War, opposition parties could do little within the legislature to stop the judicial reforms.

Following a year of protests against these reforms and three months of anti-government demonstrations amid the Gaza War, the Supreme Court struck down the bill on January 1, 2024. Though celebrated as a triumph for democracy in Israel and abroad, the vote was tight (8-7) at the historic 13-hour hearing. Moreover, the justices also ruled that the Supreme Court has the power to overturn the Basic Laws (12-3). In other words, the tight vote reflected significant support for the judicial reforms even in the High Court of Justice itself.

As far as the Netanyahu cabinet was concerned, it was unable to implement its judicial reforms in the fog of the war, but it would continue its two-decade long struggle for its bill.

The first step was taken in late March 2025, when the Knesset passed a bill to change the makeup of the Judicial Selection Committee. It is set to go into effect after the next general election. Concurrently, Justice Minister Yariv Levin will prevent the committee from naming new judges, thus effectively paralyzing the Supreme Court which will have only 11 justices, instead of the full complement of 15.

Not only does the bill mark the first time in Israeli history that the process of choosing judges will come under the control of politicians. It will undermine what is left of the democratic due process. In the name of “diversity of the courts,” it is also likely to undermine the representation of Arab judges on both the Supreme Court and lower courts, thus effectively ensuring apartheid system in judicial practices – ethnically cleansed courts, if you will.

The 20-year transformation

And so, in June over 10,000 right-wing Likud and far-right Messianic Jews protested against Israel’s Supreme Court in Jerusalem. The demonstration featured speeches by several of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s senior ministers, including Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a self-proclaimed fascist who has been pushing for ethnic cleansing in Gaza; Justice Minister Yariv Levin, the architect of judicial reforms and proponent of Greater Israel; National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right champion of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank by any means necessary, and Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu who has promoted the “nuking of Gaza.”

How to “Weimarize” Israeli Democracy

Emboldened by the incessant arms flows and financing by the United States, the triumphant far-right leaders were effectively celebrating Israel’s 20-year transformation from secular democracy to Jewish autocracy.

Such events make many uncomfortable in Israel. Recently, former Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit warned that the direction “we’re heading in is toward the end of democracy in Israel.” He described the government’s agenda as “undermining the gatekeepers and the protective mechanisms” of the democratic system. Just days ago, the Netanyahu cabinet dismissed Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara. It is undermining the Supreme Court. It is suppressing the free press, which is also haunted by elevated military censorship whose concern is not so much “national security” than the impunity of the most far-right cabinet in Israeli history.

Worse, the Netanyahu government is only beginning its purges and show trials.

From Weimar Republic to Israeli democracy

Over a century ago, it was the fall of the Weimar democracy that paved the way to the darkest chapter in the German history. It is the subversion of the Israeli state institutions that paved the way to the genocidal atrocities in Gaza – and that are now setting the stage for the dramatic fall of Israel.

In early July, the Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved a bill that would permit the next government to terminate the tenure of senior officials in the defense, justice and finance ministries.

Currently, there is a bill advancing through the Knesset that would allow any incoming government to remove top figures in the legal, defense, and financial establishments, including budget director, and CEOs of government companies – as well as the attorney general, military chief of staff, Israeli prison service commissioner, and the directors of Shin Bet and Mossad – within 100 days of taking office.

The legislation is a dictator’s delight; a legal weapon of democracy’s mass destruction. It is vital to the far-right government to complete the rise of the Israeli dual state.

The original commentary was published by Antiwar.com on July 23, 2025.

About the Author

The author of The Fall of Israel (2024) and The Obliteration Doctrine (2025), his new book, Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally-renowned visionary of the multipolar world and the founder of Difference Group. He has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see https://www.differencegroup.net

Building on my The Fall of Israel, this commentary is the second of a series on Israel’s path from democracy to autocracy. For the first one, “From Secular Jewish State to a Jewish Herrenvolk Democracy,” click here.