The Attempt to Capture the Courts in Israel

Abstract

A central element in the Israeli government's agenda to overhaul the judiciary, unveiled in January 2023, is its proposal to give it and its parliamentary coalition control over the selection and promotion of judges. This article shows that this proposal is an attempt to capture the courts. To illustrate this, the article looks at the government's proposal through three different perspectives: first, the perspective of the rationale of the current system of judicial selection, against the background of court governance in Israel and its constitutional system; second, the perspective of changes in Israel's judicial selection system over the past two decades; third, the comparative perspective of trends in judicial selection in other democracies.