Report: Israel Accuses Biden White House of “Inappropriately Meddling” Over Country’s Judicial Reform Plan
Prime Minister Netanyahu: “Israel is a sovereign country which makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends.”
After President Joe Biden told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “walk away” from the proposed judicial reform, a senior Israeli official reportedly accused the White House of “inappropriately intervening” in the country’s domestic affairs.
According to the public broadcaster NPR, an unnamed high-level Israel official slammed the Biden White House for its continued hostility towards Jerusalem despite Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to freeze the planned judicial reform.
“The official accused the U.S. of inappropriately intervening and said it was bizarre for Biden to comment after Netanyahu said he was delaying his proposal,” NPR reported Wednesday.
The judicial reform proposed by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition aims to give the country’s elected government the power to amend the country’s constitutional framework and appoint judges to the Supreme Court, a move bitterly opposed by the opposition parties and left-wing activists.
Writing for NPR, Jerusalem-based correspondent Daniel Estrin reported:
Israel accused the United States of inappropriately intervening in its internal affairs as the fallout continues from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempt to increase his far-right coalition’s say in how judges are chosen.
On Monday, Netanyahu postponed for at least a month — but vowed to resume — an effort to change how Israel appoints judges to the Supreme Court. (,..)
Biden told reporters a day later that he was “very concerned” about the judicial proposal. And he said there were no plans “in the near term” for the U.S. to invite Netanyahu to the White House — responding to what was apparently an offhand remark by the U.S. ambassador to Israel that Netanyahu could be invited soon.
Later in the day, reporters from mainly U.S. media were invited to hear a senior Israeli official speak — without naming and mostly without quoting the official — with sharper criticism of the White House. The official accused the U.S. of inappropriately intervening and said it was bizarre for Biden to comment after Netanyahu said he was delaying his proposal.
1/ A dispute has widened between the US and Israel over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s now-suspended judicial overhaul. In a briefing with US outlets including NPR, a senior Israeli official accused the US of inappropriately meddling in its domestic affairs.
— Daniel Estrin (@DanielEstrin) March 29, 2023
The Israeli response came shortly after President Biden told Prime Minister Netanyahu to “walk away” from his planned judicial reform. “They cannot continue down this road, and I’ve sort of made that clear,” Biden said to the reporters on Tuesday.
Prime Minister Netanyahu responded with a statement saying that “Israel is a sovereign country which makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends.”
On Bibi, Biden keeps Obama’s hostile legacy alive
The fact that President Joe Biden has kept up his attacks on Prime Minister Netanyahu despite the freezing of judicial reforms shows that it has nothing to do with his concern for the Israeli judiciary and everything to do with the current Israeli leader.
When it comes to dealing with Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Biden White House is holding on to the legacy of hostility it inherited from President Barack Obama.
Just days ahead of Netanyahu’s expected return to office last December, the news website Politico revealed the Biden administration’s strategy to deal with him. “President Joe Biden and his aides have a plan for how to deal with the far-right, anti-Palestinian tilt of the incoming Israeli government: make it all about Benjamin Netanyahu,” Politico reported on December 20, nearly a week ahead of Netanyahu’s return to power.
“The Biden administration will hold the presumptive Israeli prime minister personally responsible for the actions of his more extreme cabinet members, especially if they lead to policies that endanger a future Palestinian state (…),” the news outlet noted.
Both Presidents, Biden and Obama, view the Israeli leader as a threat to their nuclear deal with Iran. Prime Minister Netanyahu has described President Biden’s bid to revied the Obama-era nuclear deal as Tehran’s “golden paved highway” to a nuclear bomb. He has called the Biden administration’s appeasement of Iran over the nuclear issues a “madness and “height of folly”
Report: Biden State Dept. ‘instructs’ NASA scientist to pull out of Israeli conference
Despite the Israeli government’s decision to freeze the judicial reform plan, the Biden administration appears to be at all-out war with Jerusalem. On Thursday, Israel media reported that the Biden State Department “instructed” a NASA scientist not to appear at an academic event in Israel in the wake of the proposed judicial overhaul.
“An astrophysicist with the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been forced to pull out of a conference in Israel amid tensions with the Biden administration over the judicial overhaul,” The Times of Israel reported. “According to a report today in the Haaretz daily, Straughn told organizers of the Israel Physical Society’s annual meeting that she was instructed by the State Department to cancel her appearance,” the news website added.
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Comments
Washington does and has meddled. It may do so right up to the moment Israel self destructs. Democrats, EU trash and Arab world will be pleased..
Maybe Israel would like to switch to the yuan too? Just a final nail in the coffin of the most disastrous administration the country has ever seen.
I think the Indian Rupee is a better bet for Israel. But there is no doubt that the dollar is going down. The American Empire is over. Diversify your holdings.
I’m sick and tired of the anti-Israel vilification, antics and subversion being proffered by the utterly vile, Jew-hating Dhimmi-crats.
Yet threatening to pack the court is just part of the political game.
Israel has the same problem with their judges as we have here:
https://amgreatness.com/2023/03/28/time-to-end-the-veil-of-secrecy-inside-d-c-kangaroo-court/
And our day of reckoning will be when Trump wins in 2024 and our own streets explode with Antifa and Tranny Liberation Front violence. Unfortunately, we need to go there because it’s the only way we will defeat them. In the streets.
Israel citizens are saying it, so are Brits, Dutch, French and soon, Germans. Italy’s government is actually fighting for its own citizens. The “free” world is going to explode and there will be no escape. Get ready for it.
Not the same problem at all. Our federal judges are appointed by the elected president with the consent of the elected senate. They are constrained by the doctrines of justiciability, standing, separation of powers, and the need for a case or controversy. And they can only strike a law down if it violates the written constitution, which was itself adopted by the people. None of that is the case in Israel. Israel wishes it had our judiciary. If Israel had our judiciary there would be no push to reform it. If you sometimes feel frustrated by our judiciary, think of what it’s like in Israel and give thanks that we don’t have that here.
Israel still does not have a proper Constitution. They have a provisional government that has simply persisted since 1948. The Knesset needs to write a formal constitution, that includes means for appointing judges, and put it to the people for an up or down vote.
Sounds good, except that there is no conceivable constitution that would get a majority at a referendum.
“None of that is the case in Israel. Israel wishes it had our judiciary.”
Good info, and thanks. Without this, my choices were to remain ignorant on this, or try to parse out Israeli politics. That second was too doomed even for me.
Even so “They’re all my judges” looks like a bad patch to judges run amok, vs. a fix.
Tome Cotton gave a great interview on the subject. Strongly recommend it to anyone interested.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/03/29/exclusive-tom-cotton-joe-biden-should-invite-prime-minister-netanyahu-to-the-white-house/
Biden and Democrats have a perverted view of democracy. It belongs to them only! Of course they meddle.
Oh, and Democrats are now the pro-Palestinian party.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/472070/democrats-sympathies-middle-east-shift-palestinians.aspx
If I’m not incorrect interfering in another country’s internal affairs is a violation the Geneva Convention
You are incorrect.
What the USA is doing is extremely rude and hostile and unwarranted, but it doesn’t violate any treaties or conventions.
This is not correct. I’m not sure what is meant by “amend the constitutional framework”, but if the meaning is to enact new “basic laws”, the Knesset already has that power. No change is proposed to that.
As for appointing judges, that will still be done by the Judicial Appointments committee, but under the proposal, which is already a compromise, the government and its Knesset members will have a majority on the committee, which is not the case now. The last proposal I saw still gave three seats out of nine to the judiciary, which is three more than it ought to have, and that it has in any civilized country.
The Judiciary in Israel was out of control and considered themselves the real government. Bebe proposed to place them under the control of the elected officials and, of course, the fascist left could not have that challenge to their power. 100,000 leftists took to the streets to oppose the changes. 1,000,000 took to the streets to oppose the Fascist Left.
I look forward to the Biden Administration investigation themselves for election interference, leading to impeachment, of course. We do have those jumbotrons sitting idle…
It is bad enough that this Administration is not doing anything about Iran, has resumed payments to the PA that gets passed on to terrorists, and it is pushing the two-state solution with onerous terms for Israel, now it has the chutzpah to involve itself in Israel’s domestic politics. Have these people no shame? The current situation in Israel is politically untenable. A right-wing cannot function in the current setup imposed by former Chief Justice Aharon Barak. The left-wing unelected and self-selected judges invoke a nonexistent constitution to declare laws unconstitutional when passed by the Knesset when controlled by a right-wing. The police commissioner doesn’t obey the instructions of the minister in control of the police because the minister is on the right. The Attorney General, not appointed by the government, muzzles the right-wing prime minister for flimsy reasons and represents the government when convenient for her/him. This is not a way to run a parliamentary democracy without a real constitution. It is highly undemocratic when the will of the people as represented in parliament simply becomes a mere suggestion. Lapid and his left-wing comrades seem to refuse to accept the fact they lost the election and have thrown the country into great turmoil. Yet they pretend they are defending democracy. They are the same liars as is the left here in America
And the American Jewish establishment cowers in silence or in some cases in outright aiding and abetting Biden
This excellent article sets forth the agenda of Barak-judical activism on steroids with zero consideration for the importance of traditional Jewish or even Zionist valueshttps://www.frontpagemag.com/was-moshe-landau-a-fascist/