Netanyahu to ABC: Cries of end of democracy are ‘silly’, reforms will make democracy stronger

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the reasonableness law that passed as part of the judicial reform was a “minor correction” and that most members of the opposition agreed with it in the past. The Israeli premier also said that claims that Israel’s democracy was under threat were “silly.”

“We have to bring back Israeli democracy in line with what is common to all democracies. The essence of democracy is the balance between the will of the majority and the rights of the minority and that’s achieved by the three branches of government,” Netanyahu told ABC News.

“That’s been taken off the rails in Israel in the last 20 years because we have the most activist judicial court on the planet,” Netanyahu said.

The new law is “a minor correction. It’s described as the end of Israeli democracy. I think that’s silly and when the dust settles everybody will see that.”

“Imagine that in the United States, the Supreme Court could tell the executive, the president, we are nullifying any one of your decisions just based on something we think is unreasonable. You would not accept it, we don’t accept it and that’s what we just did,” Netanyahu said.

“I’m actually more optimistic now than I was before. Now they can see that we’re prepared to move without them, we have the majority, maybe we’ll be able to move with them,” Netanyahu said. “I want to bring the pendulum to the middle. I don’t want to bring the pendulum to the other side.”