Judicial Reform: Benjamin Netanyahu Will Increase Israeli Settlements in Palestine, No Court Can Stop Him

With the Supreme Court no longer having the power to question or nudge the Benjamin Netanyahu-led government, the right-wing cabinet is likely to increase the number of Israeli settlements in Palestine, especially the West Bank. It may also go ahead and annex that occupied territory as without checks and balances, Israel can easily trample on the Palestinian people’s rights.

But not all Israelis think like the extreme far-right religiously conservative government. Israeli liberals see the judiciary reform as an existential threat to the country’s democracy. Sami Abu Shehadeh, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and leader of the National Democratic Assembly, feels Israel has landed itself in a very complicated situation. “What we are seeing now are the results of at least two decades of deterioration toward the fascist right, and the extreme national religious Jewish groups controlling nearly all the important decision-making processes in Israel.”

There’s also the deterioration of political discourse in Israel into a fanatical, religious way of reading reality and dealing with it. Shehadeh said there has been a long process of religious national extremists taking control of all the important decision-making processes and being overrepresented in all the Israeli ministries. He pointed out that the new elites are fighting with the old elites (the ones that established the State of Israel were liberal Zionists).

“The old elites want to have Jewish supremacy built on race, but which deals in a liberal way with the Jewish people who live here, and the new elites want to lead a Jewish supremacy that is established on a fanatical national religious discourse. They are struggling over the identity of the apartheid state they want to lead in Israel.”

Shehadeh highlighted that Palestinians are not part of the protest movement because its political demands are very far from Palestine’s political demands. He explained that the old elites do not want to build a state and society on the values of justice and equality for all. They only want to go back a few months before the last elections in Israel. “For us, the victims of this racist apartheid regime, we don’t have any good past in Israeli history that we want to go back to. Our political agenda is totally different. We are aiming at building a better future, which is built on the values of human rights, mainly on justice and equality for all the people who are living in this part of the world.”

ALSO READ: No sanctions relief for Iran under tentative deal to free five Iranian-Americans: Blinken

PM Netanyahu has made it clear that he would like to allow a simple majority in the Knesset to override any Supreme Court rulings striking down legislation as inconsistent with Israel’s basic laws on human rights, passed in the 1990s. The government has been very keen to court’s dependence on international law in some of its rulings against illegal settlements, those established by militant vigilantes on West Bank land owned by Palestinian families for centuries. The court has over the years allowed the Israeli state to declare swathes of the Palestinian West Bank “state land”.

Furthermore, the Supreme Court’s ruling that Israel has no sovereignty over West Bank deeply offended members of the extremist Religious Zionism bloc led by Smotrich and the Jewish Power Party. Since Netanyahu’s re-election, these parties have acquired substantial power to pursue their goal of wrecking Palestinian lives.