Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu backed Justice Minister Yariv Levin's proposed judicial reforms in the face of backlash during the weekly Cabinet meeting Sunday.
“The justice minister presented the first stage of the planned reform. The claim that this reform is the end of democracy is baseless,” Netanyahu said.
The prime minister rejected the proposal of National Unity party Benny Gantz to establish a joint team that would formulate a judicial reform to achieve a broad consensus: "I do not remember such a proposal when the previous government signed a surrender agreement with Hezbollah. It didn't even bring the agreement to the Knesset."
"Until now, everyone has expressed a desire to restore the principle of separation of powers. Gideon Sa'ar himself said that the balance between the branches of government should include an override clause. This is an unusual phenomenon that has no parallel in the world, in any country. Wasn't Israel an exemplary democracy?" Netanyahu asked. “The attempt to restore the correct balance between the branches is not the destruction of democracy, but the strengthening of democracy.”
“We received a clear and strong mandate from the public to carry out what we promised in the elections, and we will do so. This is the realization of the voters’ will, and this is the essence of democracy,” he said.
Netanyahu's comments come after former Supreme Court President, retired judge Aharon Barak, blasted Minister Levin's planned reforms in an interview with Kan 11 News.
"Minister Levin collected all the bad proposals that were made over the years and connected them together into some kind of chain that is suffocating Israeli democracy," said Barak.
He added that "there is no greater evil than this as a constitutional revolution, the most parallel thing to this is a revolution of tanks."
Barak, who served as Supreme Court President between 1995 and 2006, first coined the term “Constitutional Revolution”.
Barak's approach, which was adopted by the Supreme Court and widely criticized over the years, says that the Constitutional Revolution brought values such as the Right to Equality, Freedom of Employment and Freedom of Speech to a position of normative supremacy, and thereby granted the courts (not just the Supreme Court) the ability to strike down legislation which is inconsistent with the rights embodied in the Basic Laws.