It’s up to Naor to get to bottom of Meron disaster

Miriam Naor, the retired former Supreme Court president, is likely to leave her mark on the State Commission of Inquiry into the Mount Meron disaster that she was named to chair on Sunday and the Haredi sector that will come under scrutiny can expect a fair hearing from an even-handed jurist.

The haredim could have been on the receiving end of a tougher commission head, but they may now wish they hadn’t complained so much about the recent possibility of the inquiry being led by former deputy chief justice Elyakim Rubinstein.

Naor is a moderate, but she is secular and a moderate activist.

Rubinstein has had run-ins with the Haredi community in a series of major Supreme Court decisions. He is orthodox and a moderate conservative.

It is not certain, though, that the differences between the two former Supreme Court justices would have made much of a difference.

Both justices have been fairly deferential to the government and the Knesset on laws favoring security a bit more than human rights compared to some other democracies.

For example, both justices routinely voted to approve home demolitions and enhanced interrogations of terrorists, signed off on some disputed IDF warfare tactics and tended to rule in favor of the state when issues of free speech and boycotts of Israel required judicial consideration.

Rubinstein was slightly more

conservative on decisions by the political class that could appear to be mildly irrational, or abuses of power, but his rulings were not blatant.

Sometimes, he may have voted more conservatively on some issues related to the settlements, though Naor also sometimes deferred to the state on settlements matters.

By contrast, regarding issues of religion and state, both justices, and the majority of the court, tend to be more activist in embracing the rights of non-orthodox and secular movements and undermining Haredi control of aspects of people’s lives who are different from them.

Naor voted in 2017 to strike down a law favored by Haredim to slow down integration into the IDF as well as to permit private conversion bodies beyond Haredi control.

Since retiring from the judiciary, Naor started in 2018 to work for the Jewish People Policy Institute on questions of balancing religiosity in the dialogue between Israel and Diaspora Jewry.

Reports about her appointment suggested that her expertise would be employed to propose ways to further separate religion and state in Israel in order to make it more palatable to the Diaspora, something which would anger Haredim.

In terms of Haredi leaders, before her appointment to the Supreme Court, Naor served on the district court panel that convicted Shas party leader Arye Deri for bribery.

In 2015, she led the Supreme Court panel that forced then UTJ leader Yaakov Litzman, the deputy health minister at the time, to either become a full member of the government as health minister, or step aside and let someone else take control of the Health Ministry.

Until then, Haredim had worked out a deal with various ruling coalitions allowing them control of certain ministries as deputy ministers, but without having holding a minister’s title. This was in order to avoid a minister’s need to fully recognize and be part of a government that is essentially secular, in light of the principled opposition to anything but a theocratic government.

So none of the Haredi leaders are excited about Naor and there is no reason why she won’t order some heads to roll.

But it could have been worse for the Haredim. There are much more outspoken activist justices, both former and current, and Naor is not one of them.

She is an institutionalist who prefers pragmatic outcomes for the greater good of the state rather than being overly philosophically principled and progressive.

If Naor thinks that reaching certain conclusions will ruin any chance of even partial cooperation with the Haredi community, she will try to steer towards the middle-ground. It is one thing to take down individuals but quite another to antagonize the entire Haredi sector.

Naor will probably try to avoid this and when current Supreme Court President Esther Hayut put a former mayor of Bnei Brak on the panel, this also showed some clear intent to dialogue with the Haredi community.

In any event, the Haredi political leadership had months to act but gave up the initiative.

Now it is up to Naor.