{"id":1178873,"date":"2023-08-13T10:55:16","date_gmt":"2023-08-13T10:55:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobin.com\/2023\/08\/benjamin-netanyahu-judicial-reform-palestine-occupation-far-right-boomerang-settlements\/"},"modified":"2023-08-13T10:55:16","modified_gmt":"2023-08-13T10:55:16","slug":"benjamin-netanyahus-judicial-reform-is-about-supercharging-the-occupation-of-palestine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/08\/13\/benjamin-netanyahus-judicial-reform-is-about-supercharging-the-occupation-of-palestine\/","title":{"rendered":"Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s Judicial Reform Is About Supercharging the Occupation of Palestine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Last month, the Israeli Knesset passed a measure severely limiting the Supreme Court\u2019s powers. The central motivation: ensuring the courts won\u2019t be able to interfere with plans to vastly increase the number of Israeli squatter settlements on Palestinian land.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n A protester is directly hit by a police skunk water cannon during a roadblock demonstration in Jerusalem, Israeli, July 24, 2023. (Matan Golan \/ SOPA Images \/ LightRocket via Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

On July 24, the Israeli Knesset passed a measure<\/a> forbidding the country\u2019s Supreme Court from in any way checking the power of the government, whether in making cabinet decisions or appointments, based on what\u2019s known as the \u201creasonability\u201d standard. In the Israeli context, this was an extreme act, since right-wing parliamentarians were defying massive crowds that had, for months on end, demonstrated with remarkable determination against such radical legislation. And that measure was only one part of a wide-ranging redesign of the court system unveiled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in January, which deeply alarmed his critics.<\/p>\n

As exemplified by prominent world historian Yuval Noah Harari<\/a>, such protesters warned that limiting the functions of the highest court, in a land with a parliamentary system largely lacking other checks and balances, represented a big stride toward a future autocracy. After all, dangers abound in a nation with a one-chamber legislature, lacking the equivalent of a Senate, that elects the prime minister as the instrument of its will.<\/p>\n

The central motivation for that legislation, however, lay not in domestic politics but in the desire of extremists in the cabinet to ensure that the courts won\u2019t be able to interfere with their plans to vastly increase the number of Israeli squatter settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank, and perhaps someday soon simply annex that occupied territory. Under such circumstances, members of the far-right Religious Zionist Party were recently excoriated<\/a> by Tamir Pardo, a former head of Israeli intelligence, as Israel\u2019s \u201cKu Klux Klan.\u201d<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

Reasonability, Fraud, and Occupation<\/h2>\n \n

The Israeli Supreme Court had invoked what\u2019s called \u201cthe reasonableness doctrine,\u201d rooted<\/a> in British common law, to strike down<\/a> Netanyahu\u2019s January appointment of Aryeh Makhlouf Deri as minister of health and the interior in his ever more extreme cabinet. Deri, a Moroccan Israeli, leads the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, largely comprised of Mizrahim, or Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry, like himself. Deri has often been in trouble with the law. He was, in fact, given a three-year jail sentence<\/a> in 1999 for fraud and bribery. In 2022, he was facing a possible conviction for tax fraud by the Supreme Court, which could have resulted in jail time and a seven-year ban on political activity. According to the justices of that court, Deri promised to retire from politics to avoid being sentenced, a vow on which he later reneged.<\/p>\n

Netanyahu managed to keep Shas in his current coalition despite its loss of that important cabinet seat. Indeed, he still needs its support to stay in power. Over time, Shas has swung far to the right on the Israeli political spectrum, while taking an ever-harder line in favor of expanding Jewish settlements in the Palestinian West Bank, which Israel seized in 1967. The West Bank is now inhabited by some three million stateless Palestinians, whose land continues to be usurped. The Shas leadership has shifted to ever-stronger support for Jewish settlements in the West Bank in large part because of the increasing proportion of Israeli squatters there who hail from the Haredim<\/a>, or ultra-Orthodox religious tradition. They had already become about a third<\/a> of all West Bank settlers by 2017.<\/p>\n

In the Israeli system, the ultra-Orthodox pay little in taxes, are subsidized to study the Bible, and are exempted from military service. Moreover, as a group, thanks to their tendency to have large families, they have grown to about 13 percent<\/a> of the Israeli population. They place a substantial burden on the state, which, in recent years, has responded by giving them inexpensive housing on Palestinian land.<\/p>\n