Supreme Court President Isaac Amit decried repeated interruptions to court proceedings by MKs and members of the audience as an “injury to democracy” during a key hearing on Tuesday over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right to nominate the next head of the Shin Bet security agency.
Continuous heckling from the audience led Amit to pause the hearing twice in short order, and eventually to clear the court entirely of the general public, with the court president accusing the hecklers of attempting to “thwart the judicial process.”
The hearing itself witnessed a rare public display of open disagreement between the High Court judges, as Amit and Judge Alex Stein clashed over central questions regarding the prime minister’s ability to nominate the next Shin Bet chief, with Judge Gila Canfy Steinitz apparently siding with Stein.
Remarks by Stein and Canfy Steinitz about the primacy of the law empowering the prime minister to nominate the head of the Shin Bet, over complications arising from Netanyahu’s conflict of interest, may indicate that the court will look for a way to approve the prime minister’s candidate for the position, Maj. Gen. David Zini.
The hearing dealt with two petitions against Attorney General Baharav-Miara’s position that Netanyahu cannot nominate the next Shin Bet chief and that he must delegate that authority to do so to another minister. The attorney general made this determination after the High Court of Justice found Netanyahu’s dismissal of previous Shin Bet head Ronen Bar to be unlawful due to a conflict of interest owing to the Shin Bet’s probe into his close aides and their alleged ties to Qatar. Bar resigned from the post last month.
In light of the ruling, Baharav-Miara had determined that Netanyahu must delegate his authority to another cabinet minister to nominate Bar’s replacement, and that the Attorney General’s Office should supervise the entire process. The premier nevertheless went ahead and nominated Zini to be the next Shin Bet chief — a nomination that the Attorney General’s Office swiftly declared severely flawed.
The first petition, filed by the Choose Life group, which represents bereaved family members of terror victims, argued that Baharav-Miara’s position harmed Israel’s security by preventing the swift appointment of a new Shin Bet chief.
The second, filed by the BaShaar – Academic Community for Israeli Society, made the opposite argument — declaring that the attorney general’s solution was too accommodating of the government, and that the entire process for nominating the next Shin Bet chief should be put in the hands of a non-governmental, professional committee.
The hearing was presided over by Amit, a liberal, along with Justices Stein and Canfy Steinitz, both moderate conservatives.
Amit had also headed the three-judge panel that found Netanyahu was in conflict of interest when he fired Bar.
Tuesday’s hearing got off to a rocky start as rowdy audience members repeatedly heckled the judges, despite Amit’s warning that anyone interrupting the proceedings, as has happened during several recent hearings on fraught issues, would be removed.
“The audience is not a party to the hearing,” he cautioned.
This warning had little effect, however, and several people were forcibly removed from the courtroom for shouted remarks, booing, and applauding at various intervals. One man was removed after shouting at the Supreme Court president as he left the room for a closed-door session to receive an update on the so-called Qatargate investigation.
With the judges out of the courtroom, some members of the audience also picked up chants of “shame!” as they waited for them to return.
Several right-wing lawmakers were in attendance, including firebrand Likud MK Tali Gotliv and Otzma Yehudit lawmakers Limor Son Har-Melech and Yitzhak Kroizer.
Gotliv and Son Har-Melech were evicted from the courtroom after taking it upon themselves to personally interrupt the proceedings by leading the audience in another round of “shame!” chants.
Gotliv has repeatedly interrupted recent high-profile High Court hearings and was removed from the court during April’s hearing on Netanyahu’s dismissal of Bar.
As Amit tried to bring the hearing back on track, it was again interrupted, this time by Itzik Bonzel — the father of Amit Bonzel, who was killed fighting in Gaza in December 2023 — who accused the Supreme Court president of creating divisions among the public and normalizing “bullying” of bereaved parents.
“All moral and ethical lines have been crossed,” he fumed, prompting Amit to once again pause the hearing.
After several more interruptions, the Supreme Court president ordered the entire audience to leave the courtroom for the remainder of the hearing.
Several people had to be forcibly removed after refusing to leave, including bereaved parents whose children were killed in terror attacks or fell in combat.
“We were witness to an attempt to thwart a judicial process,” said Amit after the hearing resumed without its audience. “I don’t know of another Western country where this happens. This is a real injury to the heart of democracy.”
He clarified that removing the audience did not infringe on the public’s right to access information about the hearing, as it was being broadcast from the courtroom.
Justices criticize both petitions
During oral arguments by the representative for the state Attorney Neta Oren, Stein insisted that the explicit stipulations of the 2002 Law for the Shin Bet should take precedence over Netanyahu’s conflict of interest.
“When the law says the prime minister nominates the head of the Shin Bet, it means him and no one else” said Stein, and argued that even if Netanyahu had a conflict of interest “there are steps that can be takem to limit the damage” of such a situation without voiding the law itself.
Stein also insisted that the prime minister had the authority to challenge the position of the attorney general, to which Amit responded: “I disagree.”
Stein continued in his attack on the attorney general’s position, demanding to know “how the attorney general’s solution is commensurate” with the Shin Bet law that the person to nominate the Shin Bet head “is the prime minister himself.”
Canfy Steinitz then joined the discussion, backing up Stein and demanding to know why the attorney general had failed to provide less drastic options.
“There is a long list of ways for dealing with a conflict of interest, and revoking a statutory authority is the last option,” she said.
“This [the Shin Bet chief] is a critical appointment, and I don’t see that other options were considered,” the judge continued.
Earlier in the hearing, Attorney Itamar Meron, representing the Choose Life organization, argued similarly that the attorney general made no effort to find a solution in which the prime minister could put forward the nomination while avoiding any conflict of interest.
Meron pointed out that Netanyahu himself proposed that, in order to avoid the issue, the incoming Shin Bet chief chosen by him would not be involved in the Qatargate investigations.
However, Amit remarked in response that this would lead to a situation “in which the person in the conflict of interest is saying he will have someone else [deal with the investigation].”
“The prime minister, whose close associates are being investigated, is announcing who will be the investigator, what the boundaries of the investigation will be; this is a problematic situation,” Amit explained.
The Supreme Court president reiterated that there was no doubt that Netanyahu had created a conflict of interest by commenting personally on the Qatargate investigation into his aides.
“He didn’t just get involved, he told the detectives what the result [of the investigation] would be — that they wouldn’t find anything,” he said. “If that’s not a conflict of interest, I don’t know what is.”
Amit also criticized Netanyahu for having nominated Zini just a day after the attorney general told him to wait until she could draw up parameters for how the appointment could be made, in light of the High Court ruling.
Amit told the petitioners that had the government taken a more “practical approach” to the issue, “it would have been possible to appoint a Shin Bet chief without reaching this courtroom.”
“That’s what the attorney general tried to do, but the prime minister didn’t wait a few days and rushed to announce the appointment,” said Amit, who suggested that perhaps it was not too late yet, and the matter could still be resolved outside of the courtroom.
Michael Rabello, a private lawyer representing Netanyahu, told the justices that the premier had rushed to make the appointment due to the then-imminent Israeli attack on Iran.
“We were on the eve of our operation in Iran,” he said. “The prime minister couldn’t share this with the attorney general, and as far as he was concerned, there was an urgent need to move forward with the process of appointing the Shin Bet chief.”
Ultimately, the Iran operation was overseen by Bar’s former deputy, known as “Shin,” who is serving as the acting head of the security agency until Zini or someone else is formally appointed to the post.
But the court also had extremely tough words for Attorney Ran Shprintzak, who is representing the BaShaar – Academic Community for Israeli Society, which demanded in its petition that an independent, non-governmental selection committee be appointed to select the next Shin Bet chief instead of the prime minister and the government.
“Why should I not reject this petition outright since what you are asking for is not written in any law?” demanded Stein, pointing out that nowhere in the Law for the Shin Bet was there any mention of convening such a committee to make the appointment.
“There is a limit to how long we can debate something which has no connection whatsoever to the law. What you are asking is outside the law, it just doesn’t exist,” insisted Stein.
Members of the opposition, including Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, slammed the efforts to disrupt the High Court during the hearing, blaming them on the government’s harsh rhetoric against the judiciary.
“The shameful attempt to blow up today’s court hearing is a product of the government’s ongoing incitement against the High Court of Justice and a direct threat to democracy,” says Lapid. “In the next government, we will pass a constitution that will prevent such phenomena and end the internal conflict in Israeli society.”
The Democrats chairman Yair Golan slammed coalition lawmakers for taking part in the disturbances, asserting that their actions were only a preview of what they would do if they lost the next election.
“The rioting of Likud MKs and the mouthpieces of Netanyahu’s poison machine at the Supreme Court today is a preview of the ‘Storming of the Capitol’ that will take place at the Supreme Court after the right’s defeat in the upcoming elections,” Golan tweeted, referring to the January 6, 2021 riots in Washington, DC after Donald Trump lost the US presidential election.
The “poison machine” is the name some avowed critics of Netanyahu use for what they say is a network of pundits, journalists, influencers, and activists dedicated to besmirching the premier’s political rivals.