The Minister Who Wants the High Court to Write More

On the evening of October 3, one of the Netanyahu government’s loudest critics of the High Court asked the court to write more. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the National Security Minister and leader of Otzma Yehudit, said it could not be that Sami Abu Shehadeh would withdraw his candidacy and the hearing would end with no principled decision. He said he had demanded that evening that the High Court publish a reasoned ruling setting out what level of proof is needed to disqualify a candidate for supporting armed struggle against Israel, so the question would have an answer for the future ^[1][2]. A politician who campaigns against judicial power was asking the judiciary for binding precedent.

The detail matters, and so does the caution it requires. Abu Shehadeh is the Balad leader and a former Joint List MK, according to the verified entity record. The label ‘terror supporter’ is Ben-Gvir’s, as quoted in Hebrew-language channels, not a finding by any court. Machine summaries circulating in this dataset described Abu Shehadeh as a Hamas figure and Ben-Gvir as a member of another party. Neither is supported by the verified record, and I have not relied on either. What the sourcing does support is narrower and more interesting: the dispute ended with the candidate stepping aside, and the minister said he did not want the case to end there.

That is not how this confrontation was supposed to go. Our earlier analysis of Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism described a bloc trying to reshape the courts and finding the courts pushing back harder than anyone expected ^[3]. The assumed contest was structural. The coalition wanted a weaker court, and the court defended its reach. What the last several weeks show is a government that has stopped treating the bench only as an obstacle and has started treating it as a tool, one to be pressed for rulings that favor its side and attacked when they do not.

The disqualification fight is the cleanest example, but it is not the only one. Ben-Gvir’s demand came as the Central Elections Committee’s legal advisers were examining which parties could be barred from the 26th Knesset race. StoryChase reported that those advisers found no basis to disqualify major political parties ^[4]. That is an official legal view pushing against the political appetite for disqualification, and it makes Ben-Gvir’s request clearer. If the legal bar for excluding candidates is not set high enough to catch the people he wants caught, he wants a court to say exactly where it sits. A reasoned ruling would give his side something concrete: a standard to argue from in the next election cycle, and a standard to attack if the court sets it too high for his taste. Either outcome serves a campaign.

The same instinct shows up in a different place. In Ma’ale Adumim, an Israeli city in Judea and Samaria (West Bank), the mayor petitioned the Supreme Court over the suspension of the E1 corridor tender ^[5]. Whatever one thinks of the project, the structure is the same. A politically aligned local official has gone to the High Court to force the executive branch’s hand. Nobody tried to bypass the court. It was treated as the forum where the decision gets made. Ministers and mayors who have criticized the justices as an unelected veto have still chosen to take their disputes to them.

The pull runs the other direction as well. Haaretz reported that the attorney general told the prison chief to stop Ben-Gvir from using prisons for campaign purposes ^[6]. StoryChase’s account says the instruction bars him from campaign filming inside jails ^[7], and it followed a Haaretz report on alleged abuses in Ben-Gvir’s prison policy ^[8]. I do not have the full text of the attorney general’s letter, and the prison service’s response is not in the material before me. The structure is still clear. The legal establishment is policing the line between ministerial power and campaign activity, and the minister’s response, in the sourcing available, has been to keep campaigning. My earlier read of the attorney general’s pre-election posture, that she had flinched on some fights, now looks too simple ^[9]. She appears to be choosing where to hold and where not to.

Even an operational order shows how far the court’s reach extends. On October 4, Defense Minister Israel Katz ordered Gaza and Judea and Samaria crossings closed on October 5 and 7 for the commemoration of the October 7 massacre. The order carved out exceptions for essential health-sector workers from Judea and Samaria and for cases where the state has an undertaking to the High Court ^[10][11]. A closure order has to account for what the state has already told the court. Some commentary framed the closure as the government using security tools for political leverage before the vote. I do not find that supported here. It reads as an ordinary security measure, and the one judicial detail in it points the other way: the court’s commitments constrain the order.

The campaign context is hard to miss. Ben-Gvir’s party hung signs on October 5 reading that if Ben-Gvir were defense minister, October 7 would not have happened, and he answered critics by saying the left reacted because it knew it was true ^[12][1]. As the election approached, DW was already framing the vote as possibly Netanyahu’s final campaign ^[13], and Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef publicly denounced Ben-Gvir amid rising tensions ^[14]. In that atmosphere, every court filing and every ministerial demand carries electoral weight.

My reading is this. The coalition’s conflict with the judiciary has changed in these weeks, though not because the underlying hostility has softened. Its leading figures now need the courts as much as they resent them. They need them to rule on disqualifications, to decide tender disputes, and to deliver the precedents they will campaign on. That dependence is the best evidence that the institution has held its position. A court that could be ignored would not be asked for reasoned rulings.

The limits of this reading are real. I found nothing in this sourcing showing a new bill reaching the Knesset floor to curtail the court during this period, though automated summaries of Telegram traffic predicted several. I could not verify those predictions, and I have not repeated them. I also cannot say whether Ben-Gvir’s October 3 demand reflects a considered legal strategy or a campaign-season gesture aimed at his base. Both can be true.

But the demand is itself informative. It suggests the fight is less about whether Israel’s courts should have the last word than about whose arguments they will adopt. If that is right, the next test is not whether the High Court accepts Ben-Gvir’s request. It is whether the justices decide that writing the standard he asked for, in the middle of an election, serves them better than leaving the question open.