Israel’s Knesset on Wednesday passed a bill heavily limiting the power of the country's attorney general.
The contentious law, which will come into effect in January, was subjected to over 11 hours of filibustering before eventually passing by a margin of 65-51.
From next year, the government will no longer be bound to follow the AG’s legal positions and will have significantly more influence over who is appointed to the role.
Ministers will be able to reject legal advice given by the AG and have the ability to dictate when they are appointed or dismissed, replacing the status quo, under which they act in line with recommendations of an independent committee led by a retired Supreme Court justice.
New law, old feud
The law is the latest development in a long-running dispute between the Netanyahu coalition and Israel’s judiciary, particularly the current AG, Gali Baharav-Miara.
Netanyahu has been attempting for several years to sack Baharav-Miara, who was appointed by now-Opposition Leader Yair Lapid during his term as prime minister in a brief window between Netanyahu governments.
Ministers have argued that she has undemocratically thwarted the agenda of elected officials and is biased against the government’s right-wing stance, while her supporters allege that the prime minister is trying to remove checks and balances on his power amid a criminal trial into his alleged corruption.
In December, the Supreme Court blocked the coalition’s attempt to fire Baharav-Miara following a no-confidence vote from the Cabinet, ruling that the government had not followed the established process to remove an AG.
The new law will now change that process, allowing Baharav-Miara to be dismissed by such a vote.
However, it will not affect her authority as head of the state prosecution service, including her ability to open criminal investigations into public officials, which had been proposed in earlier versions of the bill.
Reacting to the vote, Democrats MK Gilad Kariv, who has since filed a petition with the Supreme Court to strike down the law, claimed it would “place the government above the rule of law and shatter the delicate system of checks and balances in Israeli democracy”.
His party leader, Yair Golan, went further still, suggesting that the coalition was trying “steal the election”, now scheduled for October 27, by removing checks on its power.
And Baharav-Miara herself said the new legislation would likely be a violation of Israel’s rule of law.
On the other side, Simcha Rothman MK of the Religious Zionism party, head of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, who backed the bill, called it “a historic change” that “restores legal advice to its natural role” and “strengthens Israeli democracy”.
One last twist?
The vote followed intense political wrangling between coalition leaders and the Charedi parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism (UTJ), which suggested they would not support the bill unless their demands were met.
These included bills enshrining Torah study in Israel’s Basic Law and freezing the arrest and prosecution of Charedi men who evade IDF conscription, both of which passed earlier this week.
Even then, Rothman was forced to filibuster his own bill for 90 minutes to allow last-minute negotiations to conclude after UTJ’s Moshe Gafni threatened to pull his faction’s support unless ministers approved tens of millions of shekels-worth of extra funding for Charedi daycares.
Gafni subsequently confirmed to the media that this funding had been approved, with reports suggesting a figure of NIS 39 million, saying: “This is another step in a process aimed at equalising the salary conditions of Charedi kindergarten teachers with those of their colleagues in mainstream education.
"I will continue to work until full equality is achieved, and I will not relent until this goal is achieved.”
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