Governing by Blitz

The Israeli governing coalition’s legislative blitz last week was not merely a busy day in the Knesset. It was a calculated display of political timing, coalition discipline, and institutional intent. A series of highly controversial bills were suddenly advanced in defiance of repeated warnings from the Attorney General’s Office. The sponsors of those laws believe that now the political conditions were ripe to move forward.

For weeks, the coalition lacked reliable support from its Haredi partners, who had only partially backed government initiatives while awaiting progress on a military draft exemption bill. Once movement on that issue reassured them, the Haredi parties returned to full voting alignment. Their renewed loyalty provided the coalition with the parliamentary certainty it needed to revive measures central to its broader project of judicial and institutional restructuring.

The result was not an unusually large, dense concentration of contentious bills pushed through in a single day. The tactic was unmistakable: advance as much as possible, as quickly as possible, before political circumstances shift again.

At the core of this legislative push is MK Simcha Rothman’s bill to change how judges are assigned to cases in the Supreme Court, a measure strongly supported by Justice Minister Yariv Levin (his first name should be changed to Riv). The coalition aims to pass it by the end of the Knesset’s winter session. Presented as a technical reform, the bill in fact strikes at the heart of judicial governance. Under current law, the president of the Supreme Court has the authority to determine panel composition, to convene expanded panels for cases of public importance, and to assign judges with relevant expertise. This discretion is not incidental; it is designed to ensure seniority, leadership, consistency, professionalism, and institutional coherence.

Rothman and his allies argue that this authority enables the court president to “direct” outcomes by assigning ideologically activist judges. They want their own ideology to rule. Their solution is to eliminate human discretion altogether and replace it with a computerized system that automatically assigns judges to panels. Additional hearings would require a majority of judges rather than a decision by the court president. The attorney general has described the proposal as hasty and poorly grounded, warning that it reflects neither serious staff work nor a clear understanding of its systemic consequences.

The bill exemplifies a broader pattern: reforms framed as neutral, procedural, or technocratic that, in practice, weaken institutional leadership and dilute accountability while concentrating political power elsewhere.

A similar logic underpins the coalition’s push to overhaul appointments to government-owned companies. The so-called government companies’ jobs bill, which should be better called the “government companies’ corrupt jobs bill,” promoted most forcefully by Likud MK David Amsalem, would dismantle the existing professional vetting system for boards of directors and abolish qualification requirements. In effect, it would normalise political appointments, including those of party activists and Central Committee members, into senior economic and managerial roles. Amsalem wants to win the Likud primaries.

Deputy Attorney General Gil Limon has warned that the bill would politicise government companies, undermine professional management, harm business performance, weaken essential public services, replace professionalism with loyalty to the master, abolish any sense of responsible governance, and damage Israel’s international credibility on corporate governance. The strong, unashamed, political appeal of patronage, it seems, outweighs concerns about long-term economic and institutional costs.

Alongside these substantive, irresponsible reforms, the coalition also advanced legislation widely understood as symbolic. Two bills passed are unlikely to progress beyond declarative stages, but they serve an important political function: generating headlines and signaling ideological commitment ahead of internal party contests.

One such measure, known as the “Yair Golan bill,” would allow the defense minister to revoke benefits from former or current defense officials who call for refusal of orders, civil disobedience, or sanctions against Israel. Though framed as protecting national security, the bill raises serious concerns about political retaliation and the chilling of dissent among retired officials. Another proposal seeks to legislate Jewish identity in the public sphere through state mandates rather than social consensus, an approach likely to deepen cultural polarization rather than resolve it.

Taken together, the legislative blitz reveals a coalition that views institutions not as constraints to be balanced, but as obstacles to be overcome. Legal safeguards, professional norms, and informal conventions are treated as negotiable, provided the numbers hold. The attorney general’s objections, once a meaningful brake, have been reduced to background noise.

This cumulative erosion of institutional autonomy and the normalisation of governance by political muscle are most worrying. These measures will reshape Israel’s legal and administrative landscape, and the question is whether the system has the resilience to absorb such irresponsible bills without lasting damage.