Israel’s Government Proposes to Limit Court Powers

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB]  Times & Transcript

Following a string of inconclusive elections in Israel which resulted in unstable minority governments, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party finally managed to cobble together a working coalition in the wake of last November’s general election, the fifth in less than four years.

The government comprises 64 of the 120 members elected to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. It is the most right-wing and religiously conservative in Israeli history.

Of its members, 32 are in Netanyahu’s own right-wing Likud party. The other 32 are disciples of religious parties, which can be divided into three factions: The largest alliance, with 14 seats, are a group of religious Zionist formations, preoccupied with preserving rabbinic privileges such as supervision over marriage, burial, conversion, and dietary laws, and state-supported religious schools.

Shas, with 11 seats, is a populist, anti-élite party of Orthodox Mizrahi immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East. The Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, with seven seats, represent self-segregating communities originating in eastern Europe, living mainly in and around Jerusalem.

The new government has caused dissension as never seen before. Even two Israeli ambassadors, to Canada and France, have resigned. Ambassador to Canada Ronen Hoffman left Jan. 22, following ambassador to France Yael German, who resigned from her post last December.

In a tweet, Hoffman wrote: “With the transition to the new government and to different policy in Israel, my personal and professional integrity has compelled me to request to shorten my post and return to Israel this summer.”

Many people in Israel have expressed their concern over various aspects of the new government’s policies regarding an array of issues. But the one that seems to be most prominent is Prime Minister Netanyahu’s desire to limit the powers of the Supreme Court. Netanyahu has insisted that the reforms will strengthen democracy.

Over the past few weeks, tens of thousands of Israelis have attended rallies in Haifa, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv to vent their anger and outrage at Netanyahu’s controversial proposal to radically overhaul the judicial system.

Justice Minister Yariv Levin officially announced his intention to pass this sweeping legislation at a press conference in the Knesset on Jan. 4. Levin, a confidant of Netanyahu, explained that the overhaul would broadly restrict the Supreme Court’s capacity to strike down laws and government decisions by means of an “override” clause.

Claiming his legislation was “long overdue” and designed to limit the influence of an unelected court over an elected parliament, Levin contended it would strengthen democracy, rehabilitate governance, restore faith in the judiciary, and rebalance the three branches of government.

The reforms Netanyahu has in mind would deal a “fatal” blow to Israel’s future as a liberal democracy, Supreme Court President Esther Hayut had warned two days earlier. These seminal changes would undermine judicial independence, give the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, free reign to pass legislation that violates basic civil rights, and emasculate the high court’s role as a check on executive power. “This is a plan to crush the justice system,” she bluntly declared.

In the 1990s, Aharon Barak, then the chief justice of Israel’s Supreme Court, had pronounced a “constitutional revolution” and arrogated to his institution more power, including the right to overturn any piece of legislation.

The Court now also wields the power to override the elected government’s selections for Cabinet-level ministerial positions, as it did when it vetoed Prime Minister Netanyahu’s choice for minister of health and minister of the interior, Aryeh Deri of Shas.

The court had said Deri’s appointment “cannot stand” and ordered Netanyahu to dismiss Deri, citing his 2022 plea-bargain conviction for tax fraud. Netanyahu has abided by this decision. “I am forced with a heavy heart, with great sorrow and with extremely difficult feelings, to remove you from your position as a minister in the government,” he told Deri.

Deri’s Shas party immediately hit back, calling the court decision “arbitrary and unprecedented.” The Sephardi religious party contended that the court “today threw away the voices and votes of 400,000 voters of the Shas movement.”

Netanyahu is himself under criminal indictment in connection to a separate corruption investigation and is blocked by law from holding any cabinet seat other than the premiership. And yet his government is pushing through dramatic judicial overhaul legislation that could impact his legal situation. 

There’s an interesting Canadian angle to this. Those who want to limit the court’s powers have pointed to Section 33 of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the “notwithstanding” clause, which allows jurisdictions to temporarily “override” other sections of the document.

But the Canadian clause was passed to protect the rights of a province within the federal system. Because Israel has no constitution, no bill of rights, and no second parliamentary chamber, the High Court is the only check and balance in existence.This will give a government total control, based on its Knesset majority.

Netanyahu has won a record five elections, more than any other prime minister in the country’s 75-year history. He is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, having served for a total of over 15 years, from 1996 to 1999 and again from 2009 to 2021, prior to regaining power.

This time around, he is determined to pass his government’s agenda, regardless of what his opponents, within the country and abroad, think.

 

The Frozen Conflicts Within the Former Soviet Union

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Almost two decades ago two colleagues and I published a book on de facto states, polities that have asserted their independence but have not been internationally recognized by most other countries or international organizations as the de jure legal authority in that territory.

They have emerged because of wars and partitions, consequences of the demise of failed states. In each case, the de facto state broke away from a parent state that is internationally recognized and still claims sovereignty over it.

As we know, the biggest country to have disintegrated in recent decades was the once-mighty Soviet Union. The former Soviet space has a number of these statelets, which were born after its messy breakup in 1991.

When that federation was replaced by 15 new entities, all having been immediately recognized within their previous Soviet borders, various peoples within those newly sovereign jurisdictions in turn wanted their own independence.

Yet those same newborn countries refused to grant to the breakaway places that which they themselves had just acquired – political independence. So ever since, the secessionists remain on guard against attempts to defeat and reintegrate them. They remain entangled in so-called “frozen conflicts” which now and then heat up.

Four of these places have seceded from, respectively, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Moldova. A fifth attempt, by the Chechens located within Russia itself, led to two vicious wars in the 1990s and ended unsuccessfully.

The separation of ethnically Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijan led to ongoing hostilities between Azerbaijan and Armenia itself. The two territories formerly within Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both ethnically distinct, pulled Russia into a war with Georgia in 2008. Only Transnistria, which left Moldova, has so far not drawn Moldova into conflict with other countries.

The Soviet government first established the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh within Azerbaijan in the 1920s.The Karabakh Armenians, who call the region Artsakh, declared unilateral independence in 1991, and eventual unification with Armenia remains a popular option.

Initially, the Armenians were successful in fighting Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, and by 1994 Armenians were in possession not only of that region but also surrounding parts of Azerbaijan. But in 2020, the Azerbaijanis retook territory after a six-week long war that claimed the lives of more than 6,000 soldiers. Russia brokered the end of the fighting and placed 2,000 peacekeeping troops between the two sides.

 

A further flare-up of fighting last September also went against Armenia, and the breakaway territory lost the Lachin corridor from Karabakh to Armenia itself. It has since been running short of food due to an Azerbaijani blockade. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov Jan. 17 stressed “the need for a swift and complete unblocking of traffic” but to no avail.

In August 2008 Georgia tried to retake its two breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia by force. A five-day Russian counter-offensive prevented Tbilisi from restoring control. Shortly thereafter, Moscow recognised them as independent states. The South Ossetian leadership aspires to join its bigger neighbor, North Ossetia, within Russia.

Abkhazia, on the Black Sea coast, also borders Russia. The region fought and won a war of secession with Georgia in 1992-1993, and formally declared independence in 1999. In 2009 Moscow signed a five-year agreement with Abkhazia to take formal control of its frontiers with Georgia, and in 2014 they signed a “strategic partnership” agreement.

The self-declared republic of Transnistria, wedged between Moldova and Ukraine, has been steered by Moscow for decades. In 1990, Transnistrians felt a newly independent Moldova, predominantly Romanian is ethnicity, was leaning too close to Romania. So they declared independence, and two years later, with the help of Russian troops, won their separatist battle against Moldova, creating a pro-Moscow island of Russian speakers.

Transnistria hosts a Russian military base housing some 1,500 troops. Meanwhile, once war with Russia began, Ukrainian closed its border with Transnistria.  The separatist regime responded with complaints about an economic blockade and called on Russia to step in and save the breakaway region.

In April, a string of mysterious bombings, including an attack on the Ministry of State Security in Tiraspol, the capital, rattled the little country.

All these countries invested heavily in the symbolic paraphernalia of statehood in an apparent effort to over-compensate for their lack of recognition. They proudly exhibit their flags, crests, stamps, and national anthems.

There is an international consensus that de facto authorities are to be treated as partners in negotiations on conflict resolution. After the 2008 war with Russia, the Georgian authorities sought to reframe the conflicts over Abkhazia and South Ossetia as being Georgian-Russian conflicts. Yet they continue to talk to the Abkhaz and South Ossetians.

The Abkhaz authorities are signatories to ceasefire agreements, thus endowing them with certain responsibilities. In the Transnistria conflict, that country is accepted as one of the two sides alongside Moldova.

What hope do these territories have of being legalized or legitimized in the future? It seems that the strong aversion to recognizing unilateral acts of secession will remain in force. But at least one rebel territory, once an autonomous region in the former Yugoslavia, has gained some international recognition: Kosovo, which overthrew Serbian rule with the help of NATO, is now independent.

The former Soviet states, and Russia itself, see this as a precedent which should apply elsewhere as well.

 

Mediterranean Nation is in a Mess

  By Henry Srebrnik, [Sydney, N.S.] Cape Breton Post

Lebanon is in a mess.

But what else is new? There is no sense of national identity. The various religious communities — the Maronites, Druze, Shiites, Sunnis, and many others — claim their share of the politico-economic spoils.

From parliamentary seats down to administrative posts, the confessionalism that is the essence of the state requires their allocation by religious affiliation. In the meantime, public administration deteriorates, infrastructure rots, and inflation rockets.

STRING OF CRISES

The Lebanese people decided to challenge this status quo on Oct. 17, 2019, when people from all sects and regions took to the streets to say no to corruption, the political system, and for the first time, to the Shi’ite militia Hezbollah and its patron, Iran. But little changed.

The past few years have been dominated by a string of political and economic crises in Lebanon that were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic; the 2020 Beirut port blast which killed 216 people, injured 6,000 and shattered the homes of some 300,000 more; and a shortage of grains because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The World Bank reclassified Lebanon from an uppermiddle-income country to lower-middle-income last July. Many vital public institutions, including universities, service ministries and municipalities, are barely functioning. The financial crisis has led to an incredible 97 per cent loss of value in the Lebanese currency.

“A person that is earning 1,500,000 Lebanese pounds used to have an equivalent of $1,000 before the crisis, and now it is equivalent to less than $200,” according to Hussein Cheaito, a development economist at the Policy Initiative, a Beirut-based research centre. Those who have money in savings accounts are prohibited from withdrawing most of their funds from the banks. Stories abound of armed efforts to retrieve a depositor’s own savings.

IMPOSSIBLE REFORMS

Lebanon has seen prices soar for basic goods that has left three-fourths of the population in poverty. Some consumer items and especially many vital medical supplies are simply not available. October saw a cholera outbreak due to contaminated water, and those who can afford it drink bottled water — although it now costs eight times more than it did in 2019.

The World Bank has conditionally approved financial assistance of $3 billion upon the implementation of structural and financial reforms. But these reforms have been

impossible to implement in this political environment.

At the end of October, President Michel Aoun left office at the end of his six-year term without a successor, so the country has no head of state at the moment. It is currently ruled by a transitional government under caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati, with limited power. (The country’s constitution requires the president, elected by parliament, to be a Maronite Christian. The prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim.)

Aoun warned that weeks of “constitutional chaos” lay ahead for the country, and he’s been proven right. Lawmakers have tried and failed to elect a new president. Aoun’s opponents have blamed him and his allies, the Iran-backed Shi’ite Hezbollah movement, for the impasse.

DIVIDED OPPOSITION

Hezbollah is now trying to promote Suleiman Frangieh, who is closely affiliated with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, as a candidate on its behalf, but the parliamentary camp that supports Hezbollah (the so-called March 8 Alliance), lacks the majority needed. They have only 60 members of parliament, but a two-thirds majority — 86 out of 128 MPs — are needed to choose a president in the first round of voting, followed by a 65-member simple majority in the second round.

But the opposition is highly divided. It includes two central blocs: the remnants of the March 14 Alliance, which opposes Hezbollah and the legacy of Aoun; and the so-called Change Bloc, which includes fragments of independent parties that are not affiliated with traditional camps.

The leading candidate so far has been Michel Moawad, son of former president René Moawad, who is affiliated with the bloc that opposes Hezbollah. But in the eleventh round of balloting held recently, Moawad received the support of only 34 members of parliament, all Hezbollah opponents. Another 37 MPs cast blank ballots and several others used their papers to make a protest.

In any event, Hezbollah can recruit a veto bloc of one-third of the MPs and it is doubtful whether the divided opposition will manage to reach a consensus and achieve the election of a candidate who will challenge that organization. Hezbollah’s goal today is to maintain their control by imposing their choice for the next president and their vision for the next government.

These disputes are likely to see the continued paralysis of the Lebanese political system for a long time. While no one seems ready to declare it a failed state, its government institutions are broken and non-functional.