by Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer
What does Joe Biden have to do with Israel's court? In a sane world, nothing. Israel does not tell America how its court should work
In reality, authentic Judaism is not and never has been “progressive” or compatible with leftist ideology. Open a Bible for yourself and peruse the Torah volumes Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Of course the Torah and Judaism are compassionate to the poor, the widow, the orphan, the peaceful stranger, and the downtrodden.
Such values are not the provenance of the Left. In fact, the Left distorts those values by teaching, contrary to the Bible, that responsibility for caring for the needy falls on Government, not the individual. In that way, the individual is excused from acting righteously and instead can advocate to pick the pockets of others, taxing others to fund over-staffed, over-salaried, politically appointed mega bureaucracies that create “social justice” (i.e., socialist) programs marked primarily by failure to reach truly deserving recipients and achieve declared purposes. Instead, public money gets frittered. Departments expand and bloat. Professionals game the system. And nothing structurally changes half a century later to alleviate deserving need where it actually exists.
Judaism is conservative and family-oriented. The Biblical values of compassion and caring — not virtue signaling — completely define the conservative worldview. Orthodox Jews, for example, are exceptionally charitable, aiming to provide a safety net for those truly needing it. The government’s proper role is in situations of catastrophic need for which government truly exists: to provide security from invasion and attack from abroad; to assure law enforcement, security, and domestic tranquility; and to assure the health and safety of the public guided by scientifically validated medicine. Conservatives expect government to assist at times of hurricane, tornado, earthquake, flood, and similar “Acts of God” (a legal term of art for such events). Likewise, to oversee the development and production of safe medicines and diagnostic devices. But not to become our parents. For that last purpose, we have other people: they are called “our parents.”
The same Left strangulation in America defines the Israeli Left. Throughout the country’s first thirty years, it was ruled by a socialist extreme-left order, left-wing media heroes like David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, Shimon Peres, and Yitzchak Rabin. Those days ended in 1977. Israel changed with the election of center-right moderately conservative prime ministers like Menachem Begin, Yitzchak Shamir, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Its economy has exploded into a world-leading center of cutting-edge technology and more. And Jews throughout the world correspondingly have moved to the right. In England, the conservative party has received 69 percent of the Jewish vote. In Russia and Ukraine, Jews are the most anti-Communist of all, and one million who left Mother Russia have crushed the once-invincible Labor Party which hoped to receive their votes.
As Israel has moved to the right, the democratic will of its voters repeatedly has been stymied by a last vestige of the socialist order: a “Supreme Court” that operates as a government unto itself. Although it is called “Supreme Court,” it sees itself not only as “Supreme” when compared to lower trial and appellate courts but also as the “Supreme” ruler in the Land, capable of snuffing out Knesset laws and executive branch personnel at will.
The Israeli Supreme Court is an unrestrained separate government.
-Whereas American courts require a litigant to demonstrate he or she has “standing” to bring a case, Israel lets anyone bring a Supreme Court case, no matter how unrelated he is to the matter.
-In America, the courts are limited by the requirement that a case have “justiciability.” In other words, they may sit only on matters pertaining to law, not to outside things like, say, military strategy. An American Supreme Court can rule on the legal ramifications of the “War Powers Act” but cannot rule on whether a president, amid war, may drop a bomb or conduct a “surge.” By contrast, the Israeli Supreme Court has no reins to stop them on any subject. They even have issued orders as to who may sit for a rabbinical exam.
How have such judges gained such quasi-tyrannical control? By selecting their colleagues. America, for example, prevents self-perpetuation by having the president, elected by the public, name the judges and then the Senate, elected by the public, confirming. It works the same in American states, where governors name state judges and justices.
Not in Israel. There, the left-wing justices sit on the panel and replicate themselves. They hire each others’ kids to be their law clerks. The Chief Justice even has sat in judgment when her husband was employed by one of the litigants. And the panel includes lawyers who can practice before the judges they help select or reject when first nominated and again when up for renewal. How do you imagine judges treat those attorneys’ clients on cases before their Supreme Court?
So the newly elected Israeli government ran on a pledge to reform the Court and transform it from a separate government. As a first tiny “baby step,” they simply struck down one little itsy-bitsy thing: the “reasonableness standard.” Under that rule, the Supreme Court unilaterally grabbed power years ago to strike down anything they regard as “unreasonable.” That means they do not have to find any basis in law, any legal precedent — just their feelings. American attorneys know they must submit legal briefs citing established precedential law. That is why computer programs like “Westlaw” and “Lexis” exist, to help attorneys find case law and statutes they can cite. By contrast, in Israel an attorney can argue: “Your Honors, I know all previous judicial opinions on this subject over the past thirty years have ruled ‘No,’ but — c’mon, Your Honors, that’s just not reasonable.”
So the government of Israel, elected with a clear 64-56 majority of the Knesset’s 120 seats, just passed a law prohibiting the Supreme Court from handing down decisions anymore based solely on whether the justices feel something is “reasonable.” It is weird that something so obvious even had to be enacted.
And how has the Israeli Left reacted, now that left-wing justices have to adhere to actual legal precedent and statutory authority instead of their feelings? They have responded by rioting in the streets, blocking traffic on major highways, disrupting the country’s one significant airport, throwing bottles at police, setting fires, and threatening civil war. The mainstream Left Media are egging them on, reporting times and locations to appear for demonstrations.
Former prime minister Ehud Barak, one of Israel’s two most incompetent-ever leaders and now openly in the extreme-left Meretz Party, is calling for insurrection. He has not had this much fun since he was buddy-buddy with Jeffrey Epstein, meeting with him some thirty times, flying on his infamous plane, a “fixture at his Manhattan apartment.” Epstein-Barak Syndrome. And he is joined by Ehud Olmert, the single most incompetent prime minister in Israel’s history, who later served prison time for proven financial fraud and accepting bribes who now is begging countries to cut off support for Israel. Treason anyone?
What does Joe Biden have to do with all this? In a sane world, nothing. Israel’s leaders do not lecture America on how its courts should work. That is America’s business, and Israel stays out of it, as do all other countries. But Biden, as if he has nothing else to do, has been lecturing Israel’s government not to reform its extreme-left unrestrained Court. He is so involved that his comments on the saga appear daily in Israel’s newspapers. It is crazy.
And he now has begun using Thomas Friedman of the New York Times as his additional mouthpiece to publish op-eds repeating his messaging. He demands Israel “not rush” the Judicial Reform, even though the issue has been of public concern and debated publicly for more than threedecades.
Biden says Israel should not enact laws except by broad consensus even though that doddering hypocrite unilaterally has issued 115 executive orders to bypass Congress, and laws like his “American Rescue Plan” barely passed the House of Representatives by a whisker, 220-211 (51-49 percent), without a single Republican voting for it, and desperately required the Vice President to cast a tie-breaking 51-50 vote in the Senate. Biden has pushed so many one-sided uncompromised laws through the U.S. Senate without a single Republican joining that he has needed the Vice President to cast a record 31 tie-breaking votes. (When there is a tie in the 100-seat Senate, the Vice President casts the tie-breaker. Only John C. Calhoun of the 1830’s ever cast as many as 31 tie breakers, and he did so in the course of 2,856 days in office. Harris tied the record on July 13, now having cast 31 in 918 days.)
Biden the hypocrite likewise lectures Israel’s elected government to respect its Supreme Court even though he regularlyattacks and berates his own country’s High Court. Biden’s regular attacks on the U.S. Supreme Court have been termed “despicable behavior” by former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy.
Biden is a bald-faced hypocrite.
But glimmers of light are penetrating. The guideline to follow: When Maariv, Yediot/Ynet, Haaretz, Kan 11, Keshet 12, Reshet 13, JTA, Times of Israel, ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post all report that Israel is ending democracy, it assuredly means the opposite: voters’ democratic will finally is being carried out. After thirty years of hardline socialism and the following 45 years during which, despite voters choosing center-right moderately conservative candidates, they still have been getting left-wing results, the society finally is chipping at the vestiges of its anti-religious leftist socialist swamp.
Adapted by the writer for Arutz Sheva from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectator.
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Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer
Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/374829
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