Arguments in favor of the High Court of Justice's authority to repeal the controversial Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People as "unconstitutional" are dangerous, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked told a conference of the Kohelet Policy Forum on Tuesday.
"Doing so could bring down the fundamental system of government," Shaked said.
She said that advocates for judicial activism wanted Israel to be similar to nations such as Bangladesh, Colombia, Honduras and India, where courts have the authority to repeal constitutional laws.
"With all due respect, Israel has nothing to learn from them. Even as a joke, this has gone too far," Shaked said.
Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein also spoke at the conference and warned against the High Court repealing the law.
"It's important to the High Court that it 'help' the Knesset make decisions. We don't need help. The Knesset makes and will continue to make decisions on its own, because it is the only representative of the public and only it has the authority to do so," Edelstein said.
Former MK Haim Ramon (Kadima) warned against the Left's position on the nation-state law, saying that "the center and the Left should have been dancing in the streets over this law."
"If there is anything that will cause the center-left to lose the [next] election big time it will be as a result of the boundary between the Zionist Left and the non-Zionist Left having being blurred, and they will pay the price for that," Ramon said.
Elsewhere Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at a conference of voters casting their ballots for the Likud party in the upcoming Tel Aviv municipal election at the end of this month.
Netanyahu ignored the dozens of protesters who showed up outside the conference venue to protest government corruption and chose to focus on the city's illegal migrant problem in the context of the nation-state law.
The prime minister said he had initiated the construction of a border fence in the Negev, but by the time it could be built, some 50,000 migrants had already crossed into Israel.
"We tried to fight against their presence, but it was hard work, and we were struggling against legal interpretations resulting from petitions by leftist organizations," he said.
"This was one of the reasons why I expedited the nation-state law – to create balance to claims of unlimited individual rights. No one can argue that the migrants have the same right to come to Israel as Jews do. A Jewish democratic state means a guaranteed Jewish majority," the prime minister said.
