Feeling sarcastic?

With regard to “The new chief” by Yonah Jeremy Bob (Frontlines, October 27), I’m not sure whether “Rule of Law,” the label given his piece, was an exercise in sarcasm.

I feel it necessary to point out that “rule by laws” is not necessarily synonymous with “rule of law.” Why this became a question for me is Bob’s description of newly installed Supreme Court President Esther Hayut as a “moderate-activist” judge.

A judge cannot be an activist and still be considered moderate. Any form of activism from the bench is by definition extreme. If one applies such monikers to other professions upon which peoples’ lives depend, the very idea would be laughable.

If an engineer performs his tasks just by personal judgment and does everything by eye without bothering with the maths, the material testing and the historical performance of previous builds, no one will hire him. Or a surgeon who approaches surgery without any preliminary tests or medical imaging, and instead decides to open you up and rummage around for what feels wrong to him?

There is a stark difference, of course, between my examples and judges, because if engineers or surgeons preformed their duties so negligently, they’d likely end up sued, in jail or both. Judges, on the other hand, face absolutely no recrimination for performing their job negligently and with the capriciously caviler attitudes that Israel’s Supreme Court boasts about.

While these legal elites undermine the very values they are hired to safeguard, they complain about others undermining the rule of law and attacking democracy when it is others who are trying to rectify a blazingly unjust situation. Tell me: Who should be looked at first when democratic institutions lose their foundation? Those who notice the problem or those whose job it is to protect against the problem in the first place? JAMES ESTRIN Jerusalem