1. We need an independent judicial system

The highly-emphasized claim is incorrect as the judicial system is already dependent. Judges are part of a judicial oligarchy, or what retired judge Varda Aleshech called "a family." Independence and oligarchy do not go together. When judges are appointed based on connections and ideological closeness – rather than ability – there is no independence. The proposed reform will increase the independence of the judges and their dependence on each other, thus strengthening the judicial system.

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2. There is no separation of powers in Israel

In most of the world and throughout history, governments were coalitions, with the party (or coalition of parties) with the majority making up the government. It's logical and natural, because the government has to do what the parliament determines, and governments that do not enjoy the support of the parliament are paralyzed governments.

If governments controlled the parliament and not the other way around (as the Left claims), then governments would never fall. The constant tension between the government and the parliament is an essential part of democracy, and a situation where the tension turns into conflict is the one where democracy is actually broken because the government does not enjoy the trust of the people's representatives.

3. There's a lack of checks and balances

The claim is, of course, correct, but the direction of the need to balance is incorrect. Currently in Israel, unlike in other developed countries, there is nothing to balance the Supreme Court. All other countries have some kind of mechanism, either through a change in the law or the constitution or through a special majority.

4. Why now?

The Right has been talking about the need for a legal reform for almost 30 years. And not just the Right, but leftists and centrists – such as Yitzhak Rabin, Yosef Lapid and his son Yair Lapid, Avigdor Lieberman, Tzipi Livni, Reuven Rivlin, Ehud Olmert, and Gideon Sa'ar – too supported legal reforms in the spirit of the one currently being proposed. Their opposition to the move at this time is nothing more than a political game. Over 100 lawmakers are members of parties that believe in such a reform, but oppose it for political reasons.

5. The true goal of the reform is to prevent the Netanyahu trial

The trial is already underway, it cannot be stopped and there is no connection between the reform and criminal proceedings. The claim that a change in the committee for the appointment of judges will strengthen Netanyahu is a double-edged sword. If someone believes that the judges in the Netanyahu trial are capable of bias, then they should also believe that the opposite can happen. That is, those who think that there may be an acquittal solely due to the reform, must also understand that there might be a conviction only to stop the reform.

6. And what if the Knesset cancels the elections to keep the current leadership in power?

A basic law prevents this already now. In the long run, the only gatekeepers who can prevent a dictatorship are the public, and they need to be strengthened. The mechanism that ensures the elections is not only dysfunctional but is also politically biased: the Central Elections Committee is controlled by current and former politicians, with the Supreme Court above them, with highly controversial decisions. There is no fairness in the system. A more balanced and independent Supreme Court will help strengthen the electoral process.

7. Israel has no constitution

Former President of the Supreme Court Aharon Barak has already said that the basic laws are like a constitution, and there are many other democratic countries that don't have a constitution and dictatorships that do.

If you look at the constitutions of real democracies, you will see that they are much closer to the proposed reform than to what Israel currently has. There are no constitutions where the attorney generals are the "gatekeepers" or where the Supreme Court holds a majority or veto in the appointment of its members.

8. The reform will harm Israel's international standing

The world knows what democracy is and is not, and the proposed reform will only strengthen Israel's democracy.

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The post Debunking 8 common claims against the judicial reform appeared first on www.israelhayom.com.

The defense minister is responsible for defense. If a war breaks out, we expect him to take charge. The health minister is responsible for health. If a pandemic breaks out, he or she is the one we turn to for help. The interior minister is responsible for internal affairs and the foreign minister is responsible for international ones.

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But what is the economy minister's responsibility? The prevailing view in centralized and communist states is that the economy minister is responsible for the economy. According to the economic Left, he is responsible for directing the economy and sometimes even managing it hands-on. Ministers of economy (or industry or commerce) imposed heavy orders and regulations in order to subordinate the economy to the will of the government.

They determined how many shoes a factory can produce and at what price those shoes should be sold. The stronger the attempt to manage the economy, the more glorious the failure.

Look at history! The countries of the Communist Bloc collapsed not because they were invaded, but because they were full of ministers and bureaucrats trying to overmanage their economies. And countries that continue with this approach – Venezuela and North Korea – are mostly the object of ridicule and pity from developed countries.
But we don't have to look as far as the communist states. Look at Germany: it has surpassed the British economy, even though after World War II, the country was destroyed, with barely a building standing and half the workforce having been killed in the fighting.

Why? Because London chose to manage the economy with its ministers and quotas, tariffs, regulations, licenses, and other obstacles, while Berlin opted for a free market economy.

In Israel, most economy ministers migrated from politics and took a "managerial" approach to their job, even though they never managed anything, never initiated anything, or created anything of value. Most engaged in making political alliances with lobbyists, with industrialists who wanted to limit competition, and with workers' unions that took care of fictitious workplaces.

Throughout most of its history, the Economy Ministry was engaged in taking from the poor and giving to the rich. As such, instead of helping the Israeli economy grow, such practices only hindered the process.

Netanyahu made a wise choice by appointing Nir Barkat as economy minister. Contrary to his predecessors, he came into politics from the business and entrepreneurial sector and does not believe in dividing the economy pie among his associates, but growing it for the benefit of the public. Barkat understands that it's about encouraging entrepreneurship and competition rather than filling the coffers of the one percent. 

One word alone should guide him in his tenure: growth.

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In the latest election campaigns, most parties promised free education starting from age zero. Some made the promise because it constitutes a huge subsidy for the ultra-orthodox and Arab sectors and others due to a distributive-socialist leftist ideology and belief in the idea of a guardian state that takes care of all our material and mental needs.

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Unfortunately, Likud was pulled in to make a similar promise due to the election pressure and incorrect calculations. And yet, despite its promises, this idea should be retired.

According to estimates, such a program could cost Israel 32 billion shekels ($9.2 million) a year, which could lead to a dramatic increase in tax burden. And this does not include the cost of building new kindergartens that would house Israel's half a million children ages 0-3 in classes of 20 kids each. Add to that the search for land, which might not even be available, and the logistic nightmare that will ensue when parents will have to travel way outside the city to find a place for their children.

The benefits of such a program remain a controversy. Supporters believe it will encourage mothers to go to work, but the number of women who can be encouraged in such a manner is low – already few women in Israel stay at home due to lack of arrangement and the subsidy increased the earnings of wealthy women who already work now.

Whether Israel has the resources for this program is also questionable. The economy is already maxed out as it will be a great struggle to find nannies for those half a million babies, even from the Haredi and Arab sectors. And this is not just a financial matter, but a national one as well. Granting such free education will flood Israel with tens of thousands of nannies from the Palestinian Authority, or alternatively, the country will need to open its borders to nannies from Eastern European countries or the Far East. Israeli children will have to be entrusted to foreign workers who know almost nothing about culture and do not speak our language.

Free education for babies and toddlers is also an incredible birth incentive, and given Israel's population density, could lead to higher birth rates and subsequently to enormous economic and social challenges, which will require greater investment in education and infrastructure, harm the quality of education and opportunities, and increase the tax burden.
So what can be done instead? Mothers of babies and toddlers who wish to work should be helped in a variety of ways that are not destructive to the economy and society. This includes increasing tax credit points for mothers of toddlers at the expense of credit points for men and for older children, and expanding job grants given to those with low wages – a policy that has been proven to be particularly effective in encouraging people to go to work.

The right policy could be beneficial for both young mothers and employers, as well as the country at large.

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It has been almost a decade since Yair Lapid became a lawmaker. He first joined the Knesset based on economic and civil agendas, similar to his father's Shinui faction, and the even earlier Liberal and General Zionists parties.

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Economic and civil agendas should be of great interest to the population. After all, they cannot possibly keep track of the multitude of IDF generals who have entered politics in the last decade in search of a second career and additional pension.

While a lot can be said about Lapid about his several-decades-long journalism career and decade in the Knesset, nothing can be said about the generals except that they were generals.

Can anyone really tell what one view Benny Gantz, Gabi Ashkenazi, and Gadi Eisenkot hold? Of course not, and it's not by chance. The political strategy of the generals is based on what psychologists call "projection."

Gantz doesn't need the public to know his position on matters such as costs, housing, education, or transportation. What he needs is for them to identify with him sociologically. Anything a general says will only hurt him.

In this sense, Lapid is distinctly different from the generals in the center-Left camp. He has an opinion and a position on everything, and he even wrote a book about his political doctrine called "A Journey to Our Future". Find it alongside Naftali Bennett's "How to Beat a Pandemic" and Moshe Feiglin's "To be a Free Jew" at your local second-hand bookstore.

Lapid also fought corruption and in 2017 proposed a law that banned coalition funds. But the day he made it into the government, he forgot his own initiative and reportedly began handing out large sums not only to his coalition partners but also to extortionists within his own faction, Yesh Atid.
He also promised a government of 18 ministers alone, which he too forgot the moment he became prime minister.

If in the past, he justified such failures with political constraints, today Lapid heads the interim government, where one word of his could reduce the coalition and save tens of millions of shekels in the process.

He did not fulfill his promises with regard to the Jewish National Fund, the bill preventing a criminal defendant from forming a government, the term limit, and so on and so on.

Strengthen the Knesset? Lapid has done the exact opposite.

The tragedy of Israeli politics is reflected by the fact that the interests of the liberal secular center are represented by alternating generals with pension considerations and on-call conservatives who think in 140 Twitter characters.

The center must return to representing its constituents and not the personal interests of those elected.

As for Lapid, the prime minister has taught us how large the gap could be between what a charismatic leader promises to do when he is elected and what he will actually do.

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Let's define just for one moment what a liberal vote is in Israel. A large part of the political parties in Israel claim to be liberal. Meretz claims to be liberal. Yesh Atid claims to be liberal. And the Likud is officially called the National-Liberal Party.

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The liberal approach puts the individual at the center of political life. Liberals believe in a person's right over their body and in their ability to mold their life according to their wishes. Liberals on the left will focus generally on fields such as LGBTQ and legalizing light drugs, and liberals on the right will focus mainly on the issue of market economy, reducing regulations, budgetary responsibility and free trade.

In general, liberals are the total opposite of the Mapai approach. While the modern Mapai'niks, members of the Labor or Blue-White parties, are interested in governmental intervention in most of their and their neighbors' lives, liberals are interested in policies that take the state out of economy and private life.

When discussing the rise in costs of bread and diapers, the Mapai'nik will push for state intervention. He will demand price supervision, subsidies for bakeries and the purchase of bread by the IDF and hospitals.

These suggestions were recently raised by Yair Lapid at the cabinet meeting. For liberals, such suggestions sound as though they have just been said by Lenin, with the Internationale playing in the background. Price supervision and subsidies harm the weaker sectors of the population, exactly the people whom they are supposed to be helping, and increased purchases of bread by the state will have no effect on prices and will only harm the IDF's ability to equip itself and practice, as well as hospitals' ability to purchase medicines.

Liberals who hear such claims look for a political home that can give real solutions to economic crises and reforms that will increase profits for each individual, and not those of bakery owners or of budgetary pensions. Customs on wheat in Israel is 50% and the Standards Institute prevents the import of diapers by imposing various trade limitations (by the way, the cartel on diapers controls the technical committee 5627 of the Standards Institute). The liberals are waiting for a politician to talk about these issues.

The liberal voice in Israel is not large. The leftist outlook still controls the economic debate in Israel. Teachers are subject to the Teachers' Union and media journalists are graduates of Galei Zahal [the army radio]. Liberals and their ideas are always underlying public opinion and the corridors of the Knesset.

There are three-four mandates that the liberals give to the various political parties are borderline between the camps, and could go either way. The Blue and White-New Hope alliance has already burned itself out with the liberals. A political party of budgetary pensions, blocking competition and subsidies for those who are well connected is not exactly the legacy of Milton Friedman. Lapid and his suggestions for differential VAT, subsidies and price supervision – are also out. MK Vladimir Beliak's attempt to promote liberal policies in Lapid's party are, in fact, appreciated by the liberals, but it seems that Lapid is the obstacle to promoting this policy by his party.

Yamina refugees, such as Ayelet Shaked and Abir Kara, are not identified with a market economy and they have many achievements to put to their name, but their party's blurry political future might deter many liberals from voting for them. Many have been burned also by repeat attempts to set up a liberal party, by Aleh Yarok, Feiglin or others.

The situation in the Likud is also complex. On the one hand, the Likud is a home to destructive socialists, such as Haim Katz or Miri Regev. Both, by the way, are like weeds sprouting in the Likud – Katz came from Amir Peretz' party and Regev came from the army, where she was spokesperson for the Disengagement. Both took advantage of internal democracy procedures in the party and distorted them for their needs.

On the other side are true liberals, who are fighting for individual freedom and a market economy, including Yoav Kisch and Galit Distal. Also new candidates in the primaries, such as Erez Tadmor, Elad Malka and Dan Iluz come from liberal groups in the Likud (a group to which I am proud to belong). I doubt if there is something that scares a neo-Mapai'nik more than liberals in the Knesset. A leader who prioritizes liberal policies will win a sweepstake for his camp.

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