Benjamin Netanyahu: evaluation

Transcript context

…Can you still man the case that this may give too much power to the coalition government, to the prime minister, not just to you, but to those who follow? No, I think that’s complete hogwash because I think there’s very few people who are demonstrating against this. Quite a few, quite many, don’t have an idea what is being discussed. They’re basically being sloganized. You can sloganized, you know something about not mass media right now, but the social network, you can basically feed deliberately with big data and big money, you can just feed slogans and get into people’s minds. I’m sure you don’t think I exaggerate, because you can tell me more about that. And you can create mass mobilization based on these absurd slogans. So here’s where I come from and what we’re doing, what we’re trying to do, and what we’ve changed in what we’re trying to do. I’m a 19th century democrat in my, small D yes, in my views. That is I ask the question, “What is democracy?” So democracy is the will of the majority and the protection of the rights of, they call it the rights of the minority, but I say the rights of the individual. So how do you balance the two? How do you avoid mobocracy? And how do you avoid dictatorship? The opposite side. The way you avoid it is something that was built essentially by British philosophers and French philosophers, but was encapsulated by the Founding Fathers of the United States. You create a balance between the three branches of government, the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary. And this balance is what assures the balance between majority rights and individual rights. And you have to balance all of them. That balance was maintained in Israel in its first 50 years, and was gradually overtaken and basically broken by the most activist judicial court on the planet. That’s what happened here. And gradually over the last two, three decades, the court aggregated for itself the powers of the parliament and the executive. So we’re trying to bring it back into line. Bringing it back into line, into what is common in all parliamentary democracies and in the United States, doesn’t mean taking the pendulum from one side and bringing it to the other side. We want checks and balances, not unrivaled power. Just as we said, we want an independent judiciary, but not an all powerful judiciary. That balance does not mean, bringing it back into line, doesn’t mean that you can have the parliament, our Knesset, override any decision that the Supreme Court does. So I pretty much early on said, after the judicial reform was introduced, “Get rid of the idea of sweeping override clause that would have, with 61 votes, that’s a majority of one, you can just nullify any Supreme Court decision, so let’s move it back into the center.” So that’s gone. And most of the criticism on the judicial reform was based on an unlimited override clause, which I’ve said is simply not going to happen. People are discussing something that already for six months does not exist. e criticism on the judicial reform was based on an unlimited override clause, which I’ve said is simply not going to happen. People are discussing something that already for six months does not exist. The second point that we received criticism on was the structure of how do you choose Supreme Court judges? Okay, how do you choose them? And the critics of the reform are saying that the idea that elected officials should choose Supreme Court judges is the end of democracy. If that’s the case, the United States is not a democracy. Neither is France and neither are just, I don’t know, just about every democracy on the planet. So there is a view here that you can’t have the sordid hands of elected officials involved in the choosing of judges. And in the Israeli system, the judicial activism went so far that effectively the sitting judges have an effective veto on choosing judges, which means that this is a self-selecting court that just perpetrates itself. And we want to correct that. Again, we want to correct it in a balanced way. And that’s basically what we’re trying to do. So I think there’s a lot of misinformation about that. We’re trying to bring Israeli democracy to where it was in its first 50 years. And it was a stellar democracy. It still is. Israel is a democracy, will remain a democracy, a vibrant democracy. And believe me, the fact that people are arguing and demonstrating in the streets and protesting is the best proof of that, and that’s how it’ll remain.…

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