Minister of Justice Prof. Yakov Ne'eman and Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch decided to appoint Judge Yosef ("Sefi") Elon to be the President of the Be'er Sheva District Court.
Judge Elon was a leading candidate for a permanent position in the Supreme Court and enjoyed the support of both Ne'eman and Beinisch. However, several nationalist members of the Committee for Selection of Judges objected to his appointment.
Although Elon is the son of Justice (retired) Menachem Elon and the brother of national-religious leaders Benny Elon and Rabbi Moti Elon, he is not perceived as particularly religious or nationalistic. One episode which caused the nationalist camp to oppose his appointment was his courtroom treatment of 60 youths who were arrested on the roof of the synagogue in Kfar Darom during the 2005 expulsion of Jews from Gush Katif. Elon summarily remanded all of them to custody instead of hearing each case individually.
A group of national-Zionist rabbis published a petition last month in which they called on the Committee for Selection of Judges not to appoint Elon to the Supreme Court.
"Judge Elon does not qualify in the test of judicial fairness which the weekly Torah portion, Shoftim, speaks about,” they wrote. “The moment in which he was tested was when 60 of the Kfar Darom detainees were brought before him, including young boys. In this case he enthusiastically jailed them all and did not examine each case upon its own merits, in contradiction of the proper principles of justice. This was a peak point in terms of the disregard for detainees' rights and the principles of justice during the Disengagement period. He showed that he preferred the outlook of the political system to the outlook of social justice. Judge Elon failed this test.”
“On the other hand,” the rabbis noted, “Judge Elon adopted a lenient attitude to Col. Niso Shacham who planned to use violence illegally against the demonstrators at Kfar Maimon. These two extremes of judgment leave no room for his candidacy,” they said.
Among the petition's signatories were Rabbi Dov Lior, Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, Rabbi Yigal Kaminetsky, Rabbi Yehuda Zoldan, Rabbi Elyakim Levanon, Rabbi Eliezer Melamed and Rabbi David Fendel.