Israel’s Judiciary Is Dismantling the Reform Agenda from the Inside – and the Justice Ministry Can’t Agree on What to Do About It

The Israeli Ministry of Justice’s legal advisor and the head of its legal department both support removing Balad chairman Sami Abu Shuhada from his position over alleged links to the October 8 Hamas terrorist attack. The deputy attorney general disagrees, arguing the evidence is insufficient. The attorney general has said nothing. That silence, in the ministry that is supposed to anchor the government’s judicial agenda, tells you more about the state of Israeli institutional politics in September 2026 than almost any Supreme Court ruling. ^[1]

The Balad disqualification fight did not emerge from nowhere. Otzmah Yehudit and Minister Itamar Ben Gvir formally petitioned for Abu Shuhada’s removal, citing an article he published the day after the October 7 massacre, statements praising terrorists, support for convicted terror offenders, and what the petition describes as activity aimed at abolishing Israel’s Jewish character. The petition, filed through attorneys Zeev Wolf and David Babli, rests on two grounds in Section 7A of Basic Law: the Knesset. ^[2] Balad, for its part, has filed its own counter-request. ^[1] What should be a clean legal question – does this politician’s conduct meet the statutory threshold for disqualification – has instead exposed a fault line running through the ministry itself.

That internal fracture matters because it arrives at the end of a sustained period in which the Supreme Court has been systematically dismantling the Netanyahu government’s legislative and executive agenda, one ruling at a time, while the government has failed to develop a coherent institutional response.

The sequence is worth tracing carefully. On September 3, the court issued an interim order freezing what has been referred to in reporting as the ‘Machshava’ law – a key component of the judicial reform package – in a 5-4 decision. Justice Solberg dissented, arguing the law should not be suspended. ^[3] The split itself was significant: it showed the court is not unanimous, that the reform coalition has sympathizers on the bench, but that they remain in the minority. Five days later, on September 8, the court revoked the appointment of Yifat Tomer Yerushalmi as head of the second authority council in a single-vote decision. ^[4] Yerushalmi’s verified profile identifies her as a major general of the Israel Defense Forces – her appointment had carried real institutional weight, and its revocation in a one-vote ruling was a pointed signal about how far the court was willing to reach into executive personnel decisions. ^[4]

Then, on September 18, the court moved into electoral territory, invalidating a Central Elections Committee decision that had allowed election representatives at polling stations to update political parties on voter turnout. ^[3] That ruling is qualitatively different from the others. Blocking a law or reversing an appointment operates within the familiar terrain of judicial review of executive action. Overturning an elections committee procedure touches the mechanics of democratic competition itself – the kind of intervention that coalition members will use to argue the court has become a political actor rather than a legal one.

The government’s response to this accumulation of defeats has been, in a word, incoherent. The pattern across these weeks is not of a government mounting a disciplined counter-strategy – legislative overrides, constitutional amendments, coordinated messaging – but of a coalition that is absorbing blows without a clear plan for what comes next. The Religious Zionist party has continued pushing its judicial reform agenda, and local reports suggest that pressure is being felt inside the court itself, with institutions described as operating ‘under increasing pressure to align with the government’s agenda.’ ^[3] But pressure and leverage are different things. Pressure without a credible mechanism to act on it is just noise.

The March 8 episode is instructive here. The Justice Ministry’s own legal advisor announced that the attorney general was in a conflict of interest regarding the investigation of the state prosecutor, and recommended transferring relevant decisions to the state prosecutor’s office. ^[4] That announcement – the ministry’s top legal officer publicly undercutting the attorney general – was an early marker of the institutional fragmentation that has since become more visible. By September, the same ministry is publicly split three ways on a disqualification petition that the government’s own coalition partners initiated. The legal advisor backs removal. The deputy attorney general opposes it. The attorney general has not weighed in. ^[1]

This is not normal coalition discipline. In a functioning government, the Justice Ministry would coordinate a position before the petition reached the public domain. The fact that the division is visible – reported openly, with named positions – suggests either that coordination broke down or that different factions within the ministry are deliberately signaling to different political audiences. The first possibility reflects institutional dysfunction. The second reflects something more calculated and, in some ways, more corrosive: a ministry that has internalized the coalition’s factional logic rather than operating as a unified legal body.

The Abu Shuhada case is also a test of something the government has not yet had to confront directly: whether the legal tools available under Basic Law: the Knesset can be deployed against an Arab Israeli politician whose alleged offense is ideological support for a terrorist attack, rather than direct operational involvement. Section 7A sets a high bar. The deputy attorney general’s position – that the evidence is insufficient – reflects genuine legal uncertainty about whether published articles and public statements, however inflammatory, meet that threshold. ^[1] The legal advisor’s contrary position reflects a different reading of the same threshold, or a different assessment of the political cost of inaction. The attorney general’s silence may reflect both.

What the court does with the petition, whenever it rules, will itself become a data point in the larger argument about judicial independence. If the court disqualifies Abu Shuhada, the government’s allies will claim vindication for using the legal system aggressively against political opponents. If the court declines, those same allies will use the outcome as evidence that the judiciary protects Arab Israeli politicians while blocking Jewish nationalist ones – a charge that will feed directly into the next round of reform arguments.

The deeper problem for the coalition is that it has spent months framing the Supreme Court as an overreaching institution that must be constrained, while simultaneously relying on that same court to adjudicate a disqualification petition it cares about politically. That tension is not lost on the court’s defenders, who will note that the government cannot simultaneously argue the court has too much power and invoke that power when convenient. It is also not lost on the court itself, which has shown over these past weeks that it is willing to rule against the government on appointments, legislation, and electoral procedures – and has no particular incentive to hand the coalition a political win on the Balad petition just because the coalition wants one.

Six months ago, the judicial reform debate looked like a contest between a determined government and a resistant court, with the outcome uncertain. What the September 2026 record shows is something more specific: a court that has found its footing and is ruling with increasing confidence, a government that has failed to translate its coalition majority into durable institutional changes, and a Justice Ministry that cannot agree internally on how to handle a case its own political allies brought to court. The ministry’s division over Abu Shuhada is not the cause of the government’s judicial difficulties. It is the symptom – the clearest sign yet that the executive branch’s capacity to act as a coherent institutional force against the judiciary has eroded faster than anyone in the coalition anticipated.