Israel’s High Court issued a temporary order on Sunday freezing parts of the Communications (Broadcasting) Law passed by the Knesset plenum (53-48) on June 16.
Eight petitioners in total urged the court to cancel the law. The panel of judges, led by Justice Ofer Grosskopf, said that “the petitions raise weighty questions” regarding the law on both procedural and substantive grounds.
The court froze those parts of the law set to go into effect immediately, concerned that once implemented it would be too late to turn them back. Although petitioners argued that the entire law should be blocked, the court left to the future those elements that did not go into immediate effect (most of the law’s provisions are to be implemented in two years’ time).
Of the significant, immediate changes was the removal of restrictions governing the broadcasts of news stations. The law eliminated the need for a separation between companies and their news divisions, a rule meant to create a barrier between commercial interests and journalistic ones. The law also abolished a requirement for broadcast companies to apply for two licenses—one for general programming and one for news programming.
Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, a member of the Likud Party and the key figure in ushering the law through the legislative process, argued that such changes were necessary to remove regulatory barriers that stymied competition and prevented the development of a healthy marketplace of ideas.
“The reform brings freedom to the public, removes the shackles of propaganda from the minds of Israeli citizens, and enables them to choose what to watch,” Karhi told the Knesset after the law passed. It gives the public the freedom “to decide whom to watch, whom to listen to and what to pay for.”
“There was a failed attempt to keep power in the hands of monopolies, to prevent competition and a free market, and to keep the people of Israel from knowing the true picture regarding viewership figures,” he added, referring to a provision that addresses the antiquated way rating numbers are collected.
Critics argue that the law will have the opposite effect; creating a situation whereby the political echelon bestows benefits on broadcasting companies that favor its viewpoint and punishes those that do not.
The instrument for this politicization, they say, will be the Broadcasting Regulation Council, a new regulatory body set up by the law within Communications Ministry. Six of the nine council members will be political appointees.
The Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think tank, argued in an explainer from August 2023: “Though Minister Karhi and proponents of the reforms claim the proposals seek to advance competition, the components of the reforms, alongside the context in which they are being proposed, make clear that their objective is a politicization and government control of regulatory bodies.”
Attorney Yaniv Goldberg, head of the economic division of the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, one of the petitioners against the law, said: “The Minister of Communications himself declared that his goal is to ‘crush the left’s monopoly on the media’—in other words, to subordinate the press to the government.”
Other petitioners included opposition lawmakers and left-wing NGOs, among them The Union of Journalists in Israel, BaShaar–Academic Community for Israeli Society, Hatzlacha: The Movement for the Promotion of a Fair Society, and Zulat: Equality and Human Rights.
The last, founded in 2019, and led by former far-left Meretz leader Zehava Golan, is the latest group to join the constellation of civil society groups petitioning the court against virtually every piece of legislation passed by the current government.
Karhi expressed anger at the court’s interference.
“There is no meaning to an order that repeals a law or ‘suspends’ a law. There is no legal source of authority for such an action. It is forbidden to obey lawbreakers,” he said, urging the government to ignore the court. It is a matter of “removing the chains of the legal dictatorship,” he said.
Karhi told JNS, “There are no problems in the process. Everything was done according to the law and according to the Knesset regulations. The claims are claims of vested interests and various legal advisers who tried to thwart the law and failed.
“Judge Grosskopf, in a cynical display of arrogance and lack of self-awareness, a single judge, thinks he can, with a wave of his pen, overturn the decision of the Cabinet and the Knesset, after several years of discussions and long months of legislation and hard work. The court is obliged to judge according to the laws of the state. No one gave the court the authority to overturn laws,” he continued.
“The law passed in second and third readings, and it became valid and entered the statute book of the State of Israel,” Karhi said.
While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not comment on the court’s actions, other members of the coalition spoke out.
Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir of the Otzma Yehudit Party called the judges “dictators in black robes,” who are “once again trampling the will of elected officials.” He said it was up to the next right-wing government to eliminate the “deep state.” (National elections are to be held on Oct. 27.)
Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of the Religious Zionism Party said: “The fact that a novice judge, in a single hearing and in the presence of one party, automatically issues an order that freezes Knesset legislation for the second time in a week, as if that was the default, is absolute insanity that shows that the Supreme Court has lost all restraint in its war against the Knesset and the national government.”
The petitioners praised the court’s decision. Efrat Rayten of The Democrats Party called it “a significant achievement in the struggle against one of the most corrupt and dangerous laws passed by the government—a law that was born to serve the political interests of a government headed by a criminal defendant, at the expense of the public.”
On July 13, in an unprecedented move, a three-judge panel of the High Court—Justices Yitzhak Amit, Alex Stein and Yehiel Kasher—convened to hear petitions against the law before it was passed. In a peculiar move, the justices called the hearing only to decide it was too early to hear the petitions.
Judge Haran Fainstein, a retired Israeli judge who taught at Bar-Ilan University’s Department of Criminology, explained to JNS that this is the way the court sets precedent. In this instance, it holds a hearing on a law that has not passed, which it acknowledges is premature and unprecedented. But in the court’s mind, it has established the idea that it is entitled to judge laws before they become laws.
Lending weight to his analysis, Justice Kasher questioned whether the case was extreme enough to justify the precedent-setting move, suggesting there are criteria—"extremity"—when court interference is justified.
It sets the stage for a future in which “non-laws” are struck down.
“They know in advance what their decision will be. That’s the reason why the respondent should not argue with legal precedents. My advice, which I state every Friday morning on [radio station] Galei Israel, is to argue that the court lacks jurisdiction. Any additional argument is a waste of time,” said Fainstein.
