Finally, Israel's True Judicial Revolution

In a close and secret vote, the Knesset voted MKs David Rotem (Israel Our Home) and Uri Ariel (National Union) as its representatives on the Committee for the Appointment of Judges.

Rotem, who chairs the Knesset Law Committee, was a foregone favorite to win one of the two slots - while Ariel was a surprise winner for the "opposition" slot. Ariel's race against Bar-On was the subject of great tension, with some Likud members saying they would vote for Bar-On - despite Bar-On's centrist-left orientation. In the event, Ariel received 59 votes, one more than Bar-On's 58.

The results of the vote mean that the nationalist camp, for the first time in memory, has a slight edge in the appointment of judges in the coming year.

An insight:

During the past decade and a half, a remarkable gap has opened up in Israel between the unprecedented activism of the country’s Supreme Court, on the one hand, and the paucity of substantive intellectual debate about the court’s practices, on the other. The Israeli High Court has been among the boldest anywhere in the democratic world, going well beyond the letter of the law in striking down the actions of the government and legislature in a range of areas including foreign and defense policy, religion and state, family law, edu­ca­tion, and the appointments of high-ranking officials. Moreover, a sub­stantial segment of the public has responded to many of the court’s decisions with alarm, and has made judicial activism a subject of mass de­­mon­­strations as well as a central issue in national elections.

In such circumstances, one would have expected Israel’s legal scholars to play a constructive role in shaping the public debate—by providing well-grounded arguments that could shed light on the pros and cons of judicial activism, by examining the jurisprudential philosophy of the court in its theoretical and comparative contexts, and by offering the public an example of reasoned debate in which adversaries are treated with respect. Unfor­tu­nately, the scholarly community in Israel has not risen to the occasion. With the notable exception of current Supreme Court President Aharon Barak—who, through his many books, articles, and extensive court decisions spanning two decades, has made himself not only the leading practitioner of an activist judicial philosophy but also its preeminent theoretician—Israeli scholars have produced hardly any written work on judicial activism beyond a smattering of narrowly focused papers in law journals. And, since critiques of the trend towards activism have been especially sparse, what little discussion has taken place has been rather uninspired, a dialogue among scholars who largely agree with one another.
But if scholarly writings on judicial activism have been rare, comprehensive treatments aimed at the general reader have been even scarcer.