After pivotal judicial reform vote, US Jewish groups unleash their newfound voices on Israeli domestic policy

Ron Kampeas

WASHINGTON (JTA) — For months earlier this year, mainstream American Jewish groups waffled on how much to weigh in on Israel’s internal political debates, something many had studiously avoided in the past.

But that felt like a distant memory on Monday, July 24, after Israel’s parliament approved a law that its authors and critics — including many of those American Jewish groups — alike said would reshape the country.

Reactions poured in immediately, many of them deeply critical of what Israel’s right-wing government had just done in signing off on a law that diminishes the power of the Supreme Court to review government decisions.

The American Jewish Committee had a statement ready to go as soon as the law passed expressing “profound disappointment” over the passage of the law which removes from the courts the right to judge laws against a standard of reasonableness.

“The new law was pushed through unilaterally by the governing coalition amid deepening divisions in Israeli society as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have taken to the streets,” the AJC said.

The AntiDefamation League soon followed. “This initiative and other judicial overhaul proposals could weaken Israeli democracy and harm Israel’s founding principles as laid out in the Declaration of Independence,” its statement said.

The Jewish Federations of North America said it was “extremely disappointed that the leaders of the coalition moved ahead with a major element of the reforms without a process of consensus, despite the serious disagreements across Israeli society and the efforts of President

The ADL, the AJC and the JFNA, like President Joe Biden did in a statement, urged the Israeli government and its opposition to continue to seek a compromise even in the wake of the passage of the momentous law. Groups to their left, including the Reform movement, urged American Jews to step up the pressure on Israel to make changes, and J Street said the Biden administration had a role in leveraging that pressure. The Conservative movement said that the passage of the law “represents a clear and present danger to the country’s independent judiciary, which may still come under further assault.”

The force of the pronouncements shows how much has changed since as recently as March when some of the same legacy organizations were struggling with how far to go in objecting as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared ready to ram a package of judicial legislation through with alacrity. A bid in March to come up with a statement uniting all the legacy Jewish groups nearly collapsed amidst last minute changes.

Speaking out forcefully against an Israeli government has never been a happy place for the legacy groups. For decades, their doctrine had been to let Israelis decide what’s best for them unless it directly impacted Diaspora Jewish communities. The yearslong battle over organized non-Orthodox worship at the Western Wall was one of the exceptions that proved the rule.

But in recent months, the reluctance to speak out changed, and not just because weakening the courts undermines the branch of Israeli government that has protected the non-Orthodox. American Jews, rattled by perceived antidemocratic tendencies at home, seem more attuned to the threat the same tendencies pose in Israel, according to a poll last month by the Jewish Electorate Institute. It showed pluralities