Supreme Court chief justice blasts Israeli electoral democracy

“The idea that ‘the majority decides,'”  said Justice Yitzchak Amit, “is fourth-grade democracy.”

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

The president of Israel’s Supreme Court was heard scoffing at the principles of democracy in a recording publicized on Sunday by Channel 14.

While talking on Thursday to a group of students soon to be drafted into the army, Justice Yitzchak Amit defended the court’s judicial activism, including the nullification of Basic Laws passed by the Knesset.

His comments included an explicit rejection of what he dubbed “electoral democracy.”

“Stop bothering me about what’s colloquially called ‘electoral democracy’…. that’s fourth-grade democracy,” he said.

“Democracy is not just ‘the majority decides,’ because we have certain rights that are specifically meant to protect the minority and also to protect certain values,” he continued. “Electoral democracy is a very, very tattered one.”

Amit went even further when someone in the audience asked, “If the majority gave the Supreme Court the authority to invalidate laws, why can’t it take [that right] away from the judges?”

The justice answered, “Because then you won’t have democracy; you’ll have something else.”

Since electoral democracy means the public voting in its representatives to the Knesset, Amit was essentially stating that the legislative branch of government should not, and could not, be the final arbiter of the law.

Instead, it is the job of the courts, whose judges are not elected by the people, to decide what “rights” and “values” are supreme, and can overturn laws that do not fit those rights and values.

The Supreme Court has often canceled new Knesset laws over the last several years, even those that passed with large, but right-wing majorities, revealing a bias that has caused most people on the conservative side of the political map to distrust the court’s claims of impartiality.

The panel on Channel 14, which is known as a right-wing media outlet, argued that Amit’s statements were an “expression of deep contempt for the citizenry” and that the justice was “deciding what democracy means according to what is convenient for him.”

Amit also compared Supreme Court justices to soccer referees, saying that just as in a game the referees decide what is a legal or illegal on the field, the last word in the country must belong to the court.

This was ridiculed by the panel, which pointed out that if an umpire makes too many errors in judgment, the league will not allow him to officiate at future matches, while there is no recourse when justices are proven to be biased towards one side or another.

Amit was elected as head of the Supreme Court in January after his own court forced the Knesset’s Judicial Selection Committee to do so based on the tradition, but not law, that the most senior justice becomes president when the post becomes vacant.

Justice Minister Yariv Levin boycotted the vote because he fiercely opposed Amit’s selection, believing him unfit to serve in the position due to his left-wing bias, and several cases where, he said, Amit had “apparently acted while in a conflict of interests, and concerning building infringements at his home,” without “a professional and objective enquiry into these claims” being made.