Israel’s Supreme Court Is Rewriting the Rules of Executive Power – One Appointment at a Time

The Israeli government’s own legal representative has now been authorized to accompany an investigation into a former police officer’s case – a procedural footnote that, on its face, sounds like routine administrative housekeeping ^[1]. It is anything but. It is the latest move in a months-long institutional chess match in which the Supreme Court has been methodically dismantling the Netanyahu coalition’s reform agenda, not through a single dramatic constitutional ruling, but through a relentless accumulation of smaller interventions that, taken together, amount to something larger: a judiciary that has decided it will not yield.

To understand how we arrived here, you have to go back further than the headlines suggest. The conflict between the Netanyahu government and the court did not begin in August 2026. The judicial reform package – the attempt to curtail the court’s power to strike down legislation, reshape the judicial appointments committee, and limit the ‘reasonableness’ standard by which courts review executive decisions – has been grinding through the Knesset and the courts for the better part of two years. What changed this summer is the pace and specificity of the court’s pushback. The judiciary shifted from defending broad constitutional principles to targeting individual government decisions with surgical precision ^[2].

The clearest illustration of that shift came on September 8, when the Supreme Court unanimously revoked the government appointments of Dr. Yifat Ben-Hayim-Shaviv as chair of the Second Authority for Television and Radio, along with two council members, legal advisor Cnaan Bar-El and Dr. Haim Shaien ^[2]. The decision, reported by political writer Michael Shemesh of Kan 11, was unanimous – not a close call, not a contested 5-4 split, but a full bench rejection ^[2]. The government had treated the Second Authority as a patronage vehicle; the court treated that as a legal nullity.

That same day, separately, the court revoked the appointment of Yifat Tomer Yerushalmi – verified in the StoryChase database as a major general of the Israel Defense Forces – as head of the second authority council, in a single-vote decision ^[1]. Two appointment reversals in a single day, targeting different institutions, signals something beyond routine judicial review. It signals a court that has concluded the executive is operating outside legal boundaries systematically, not episodically.

The week before, on September 3, the court had issued an interim order freezing 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. That dissent matters: it shows the court is not monolithic, and the government retains genuine allies on the bench. But a 5-4 freeze is still a freeze, and the Machshava law sits suspended while the coalition tries to figure out its next move ^[2].

Running parallel to these appointment battles is a separate saga that cuts even deeper into the relationship between executive power and institutional accountability. For months, Shin Bet officers who allegedly used surveillance technologies to obstruct the appointment of David Zini as head of the agency have been refusing to disclose their identities – not to the public, not to the court, and not to Zini himself ^[1]. A petition was filed in July demanding the Attorney General explain why no investigation had been opened against senior Shin Bet figures for what petitioners described as unlawful use of wiretapping to sabotage a government appointment ^[2]. The court’s response, according to local reports, was less than sympathetic to the officers’ position.

By September 10, local reports indicated that Shin Bet officers involved in the Zini investigation were still hiding and avoiding disclosure of their identities despite a court order – their legal representatives arguing before the High Court that Zini should be prohibited from sharing their names with any third party and should commit that the names would not be entered into any service or system ^[1]. One representative reportedly requested a delay on the grounds that he was abroad. The court’s patience with these delay tactics appears to be running thin.

This episode is worth dwelling on, because it sits at the intersection of all the tensions that have been building. You have a newly appointed Shin Bet chief – Zini – whose appointment was itself allegedly targeted by officers within his own agency using surveillance tools. You have a court that ordered disclosure of those officers’ identities. You have those officers, through their lawyers, asking the court to restrict what Zini can do with the very names the court ordered him to receive. And you have a government whose legal representative has now been authorized to accompany a related investigation into a former police officer ^[1]. Every actor in this drama is simultaneously trying to use the court as a shield and a weapon.

The Ministry of Justice dimension adds another layer. As far back as March 2026, the Ministry’s legal department was already proposing that decisions in the ‘Pitz’rit’ case investigation be transferred from the Attorney General to the State Prosecutor, on the grounds that the Attorney General faced a conflict of interest ^[2]. That proposal – to route sensitive decisions around the Attorney General – is precisely the kind of institutional reshuffling that the reform agenda has been pursuing through legislation. The fact that it was being attempted through internal administrative channels as well suggests the government has been pursuing its institutional goals through multiple tracks simultaneously.

Ben Gvir’s cancellation of a round of police appointments in early September, following a dispute with Police Commissioner Danny Levy over the proposed appointment of Tamar Liberty as deputy to the police legal advisor, fits the same pattern ^[2]. Levy had agreed with the minister, then reversed course at the last moment and announced the appointment anyway. Gvir blocked it. The episode illustrates how thoroughly the conflict over institutional appointments has permeated every corner of the security and law enforcement establishment – this is not a battle confined to the Supreme Court chamber.

What makes the court’s position genuinely interesting – and genuinely uncertain – is that it is winning individual battles while the structural question remains unresolved. Voiding appointments, freezing legislation, ordering disclosure of identities: these are real interventions with real consequences. But the Machshava law freeze is interim, not final. The judicial appointments reform process has not been permanently struck down. The coalition still commands a Knesset majority. And Justice Solberg’s dissent on the Machshava freeze is a reminder that the court itself contains justices sympathetic to the government’s position on the limits of judicial review.

The government’s response to each setback has been revealing in its restraint. There has been no legislative override attempt, no emergency session to circumvent the court’s interim orders – at least not yet. The coalition’s silence may reflect strategic calculation: let the court overextend, build a public case that the judiciary has become an unelected veto player, then move. Or it may reflect genuine uncertainty about whether the coalition math holds for a direct confrontation. The defection of even two or three coalition members on a measure seen as openly defying the Supreme Court could be fatal to the government.

What the pattern of the past month actually demonstrates is that the court has concluded it cannot wait for a single definitive constitutional confrontation. Instead, it is contesting the government’s agenda at every specific point of contact – appointments, legislation, disclosure orders, case transfers. The government, meanwhile, is pursuing its institutional goals through legislation, administrative reshuffling, and ministerial fiat simultaneously. The result is not a constitutional crisis in the dramatic sense, but something arguably more corrosive: a sustained, grinding contest over who actually controls the levers of the Israeli state, fought out in committee rooms, court chambers, and police headquarters, with no clear endpoint in sight.

Israeli democracy has navigated coalition collapses, military crises, and corruption trials before. The institutional checks have held, imperfectly but genuinely. Whether they hold this time depends less on any single ruling than on whether the accumulated weight of these smaller confrontations produces a breaking point – or a negotiated settlement that neither side will publicly acknowledge as such.