MK Simcha Rothman, the chairman of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, sharply attacked the High Court and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, saying they want to run the country without public accountability.

Speaking in an interview with Kol Chai on Monday, Rothman said, “There is no doubt that the High Court and the Attorney General want to run the country without bearing responsibility or consequences.”

Regarding the closure of Army Radio, Rothman argued that the court is trying to drag things out: “They can delay, interfere, shout—ultimately, if the government and the Knesset are determined, Army Radio will not exist.” He added: “The High Court is having a tantrum… but just like a child having a tantrum, what you do is let him scream until he runs out of strength.”

Rothman also slammed the Court’s intervention in the appointment of Shin Bet chief David Zini, saying: “They spent hours upon hours, days upon days, on a baseless petition… a jumble of media reports… and in the end they come and say they don’t have grounds for intervention,” he said. “It takes an unparalleled level of brazenness,” he added, noting the “brazen and outrageous minority opinion of Yitzchak Amit.”

“Zini was already in the position for quite some time before the judgment… it’s like a fly sitting on an elephant’s back and saying, ‘Look how much we plowed’—that’s the Supreme Court.”

Asked whether it is legitimate for the Supreme Court to review every decision, he replied emphatically: “No. Because there are things the law forbids it to intervene in… the Basic Law forbids the Supreme Court from intervening.” He added a sharp warning: “A court that does not uphold the law—its rulings have no legal, moral, or ethical validity.”

Prof. Moshe Cohen-Eliya also addressed the issue of the Court’s meddling in Zini’s appointment in an article published by Channel 14, entitled “The Shattered Illusion: The Zini Ruling Proves There Are No Conservative Justices On The Supreme Court.”

Cohen-Eliya wrote, “Although the petitions against the appointment of David Zini as head of the Shin Bet were rejected, the path to that outcome exposes the bluff: when the majority justices scrutinize protocols meticulously as if they were a selection committee, they prove that they too are not genuine conservatives but ‘light’ judicial activists. In the face of the extremism of Yitzchak Amit, even Noam Sohlberg and David Mintz lend a hand to the improper norm of judicial intervention in appointments—something that in the United States would be considered a constitutional absurdity.”

“On Sunday, the High Court rejected the petitions against the appointment of David Zini as head of the Shin Bet. The decision was adopted by a majority consisting of Deputy President Noam Sohlberg, with the concurrence of Justice David Mintz, against the dissenting opinion of Justice Yitzchak Amit. Anyone who delves into the judgment published yesterday regarding Zini’s appointment might mistakenly think they are reading the minutes of a selection committee rather than a judicial ruling.

“First and foremost, there is no democratic country in the world where the ‘reasonableness’ of an appointment is examined—certainly not the appointment of the head of a clandestine security organization. Only in Israel can one produce a lengthy judgment devoted to such a question. The very fact that the issue is addressed judicially demonstrates how far the High Court has strayed from norms accepted in functioning democracies.

“Moreover, Yitzchak Amit, as usual, positions himself as the most extreme figure on the High Court. He believed an injunction order should be issued, determined that the understandings regarding the Prime Minister’s authority to appoint the head of the Shin Bet had not attained the status of a judgment, and ruled that the selections committee erred when it assumed there was no place to examine the integrity of the appointing authority, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. He even capped his opinion with a public warning to Zini to act ‘with statesmanship.’ It’s interesting that similar admonitions were not heard in the past toward other Shin Bet chiefs, who in practice often acted as a political arm of Israel’s old hegemony and displayed no statesmanship whatsoever.

“I don’t believe the rulings of Justices Noam Sohlberg and David Mintz should be labeled ‘conservative.’ A conservative judge—or a democratic judge—would have dismissed petitions of this kind outright. The punctilious engagement with details such as how Netanyahu interviewed Zini, or whether Zini received approval from the Chief of Staff, would be regarded in the United States as utterly bizarre.

“It’s hard to imagine a situation in which the American judicial system would intervene in appointments made by an elected president in this manner. In the United States, criticism of appointments is political–parliamentary, exercised through Congress, not judicial. Therefore, it is more accurate to say that Amit is a hyper-activist judge, while Sohlberg and Mintz are judges who are less activist than he is—but not conservative judges in the deeper sense of the term.

“Amit is a judge without boundaries, one who lacks basic democratic sentiment. He is prepared to intervene even in the appointment of the head of the Shin Bet, thereby continuing to entrench the anti-democratic doctrine of ‘the bureaucrat as leader.’ This shapes a conception whereby the judicial echelon prevails over the elected echelon. Amit will be recorded in the history books as the ‘president’ during whose tenure public trust in the High Court collapsed—not due to an external attack, but as a direct result of unrestrained internal conduct.”

(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)