Israel’s Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to dismiss one of his cabinet’s most senior ministers, Aryeh Deri, over a conviction for tax fraud – a crime he confessed to last year in a court deal to escape prison. Holder of the Interior and Health portfolios, Deri is also leader of the ultra-religious Shas party.
More than representing a setback for the recently sworn-in ultra-right government, the decision is part of a context of growing tension between the prime minister and the judiciary. Netanyahu has proposed a controversial judicial reform that would allow, among other measures, the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, to overturn Supreme Court decisions in a simple majority vote. The coalition that elected Bibi already has a quorum in the House.
The government argues that reform is necessary to take justice out of the hands of what it calls elitist and biased judges. In practice, however, it would give the prime minister and his allies superpowers for the duration of his administration — even the decision on the minister’s dismissal could be overturned if the new rules were already in force.
Opponents say the change would undermine the independence of the judiciary and weaken the balance of powers that underpins the rule of law.
Ten of the 11 magistrates voted against Deri, who would still assume the finance portfolio thanks to a rotation agreement within the new government. “A majority of judges have ruled that this appointment is extremely unreasonable and therefore the Prime Minister must remove Deri from office,” the Supreme Court said in a statement. Some of the members of the collegiate also stated that the minister had committed himself to leaving politics by signing the judicial agreement that prevented him from going to prison.
Netanyahu did not comment on the case, but his allies criticized the Supreme Court order. A member of the same acronym as Bibi, Justice Minister Yariv Levin said he would do “everything necessary to redress this obvious injustice with Rabbi [Deri]the Shas and Israeli democracy”. The Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, echoed Levin’s speech and defended the progress of judicial reform, which has not yet left the drawing board.
Shas, in turn, said the decision was political. “The court ruled today that the elections mean nothing,” he said in a statement. The acronym, which strongly opposes attempts to diminish Israel’s Jewish religious characteristics and gained popularity by defending the interests of Sephardim -Jews of Iberian origin, who migrated to Arab countries in their majority-, won 11 of the 120 seats in the Knesset in the last year’s elections.
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