Opposition bickers over rep for judges selection panel

June 15 deadline to determine contentious makeup of c’ttee

Opposition leader Yair Lapid, National Unity chairman Benny Gantz and Labor leader Merav Michaeli faced off on Monday over which opposition MK will serve as a member of the nine-member Judicial Selection Committee. The deadline to form the committee is June 15.

The committee elects judges for Israel’s entire court system, including for the High Court of Justice. The committee’s makeup is one of the most contested issues in the negotiations over the government’s judicial reforms being held at the President’s Residence. The coalition wants to give itself a majority in the committee and thus control judicial appointments, while the opposition says this would politicize the courts and harm the judicial system.

The coalition postponed the initial deadline to form the Judicial Selection Committee in March, but it chose not to postpone it again, meaning that the committee must be established by June 15.

Assuming agreement over its composition will not be reached by then, the committee will rely on the current law and include three Supreme Court justices (including the chief justice), two cabinet ministers (including the justice minister), two MKs and two members of the Israel Bar Association. One each of the justices, MKs, cabinet ministers and Bar members must be a woman.

The coalition traditionally enables the opposition to fill one of the two Knesset spots in the committee, but coalition members threatened in recent weeks that if no agreements are announced over the judicial reforms by the time the vote is held, it will use its majority in the Knesset to break this tradition and grant itself both Knesset spots on the committee. In response, members of the opposition’s negotiating teams threatened that if the coalition does this, they will leave the negotiations at the President’s Residence.

The spat among the opposition parties began Monday morning when Yesh Atid called on National Unity to support its candidate for the committee, former energy minister Karine Elharrar.

“The opposition cannot destroy itself again,” Lapid said. “I call on the members of the opposition not to divide the votes and stand behind Karine Elharrar as our representative on the Judicial Selection Committee. It is unthinkable that we will give to [Justice Minister Yariv] Levin and [Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee chairman Simcha] Rothman such a gift and divide the vote.”

National Unity said in a statement: “Lapid is trying to tie the horses before the carriage and is endangering the

• with Zionism.

It’s not a surprise that Turkey was one of the early Muslim countries to have ties to Israel after 1948. Those ties generally improved through the late 1990s, when they reached a peak. The last two decades, however, have seen more tensions and controversies.

The tensions between Israel and Ankara are multilayered. Ankara’s ruling party is rooted in political Islamic values. It not only seeks a greater role in the Muslim world but also wants to champion causes it thinks are popular with the Arab and Muslim world. Toward that end, it has backed Hamas in the past and hosted Hamas leaders.

But it wasn’t always this way. Ankara wanted to play a once-upon-a-time role in the PA-Israel peace process and even peace between Israel and Syria. Those days of “zero problems” are now gone, and Ankara has spent several years, primarily during the Trump administration, cooking up crises with various countries, including Israel, Greece, the Gulf, the US, EU and others.

Today, the political winds are shifting. The Middle East is reconciling. Diplomacy is the new norm, and countries such as Saudi Arabia are now working with Iran and Syria. Ankara’s politics of stoking tensions and then climbing down and asserting that tensions lead to respect may be out of step with the modern Middle East.

They were a symptom of an era when the US appeared to be declining, and Ankara wanted a more robust strategic policy by which it would try to play Moscow off against Washington and work with Iran and other states, such as China.

Today, Ankara appears more confident that its policies have achieved the success and respect it wants. What that may mean is that Turkey and Israel can achieve a modus vivendi, where neither the Netanyahu or Erdogan governments share values or necessarily agree, but they can maneuver with less controversy than in the past.

It’s important to understand how the relations with the West play into this. Turkey has sabotaged its relationship with Washington through attacks on the US-backed SDF, acquiring Russia’s S-400 anti-missile system and generally threatening the US often. Western countries pay lip service, pretending to congratulate Erdogan on his victory, but mostly because they don’t want more problems amid the Ukraine war and tensions with China and Russia.

Ankara assumes that the West is declining and that the world is becoming multipolar, with US hegemony evaporating. Ankara shares this view with Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran. Israel does not share this view, but it is aware of how shifting power structures force countries to make complex decisions, such as Riyadh reconciling with Tehran.

During the Trump era, Ankara exploited close ties to Washington, and a sense that the US was isolationist, to create a host of tensions, including authoritarianism at home and a referendum to empower the president, invasions of Afrin and other parts of northern Syria, and greater involvement in Libya, parts of Africa and the Caucasus.

Bizarrely, the Trump era led to Ankara hosting Hamas more, whereas one might have assumed that a pro-Israel administration in the US that was also close to Ankara could have gotten the red carpet pulled from Hamas. Instead, Ankara shifted its language when Biden came into office, suddenly preferring reconciliation, with the hope that ties with Israel might help in Washington.

Now, this comes full circle. The US has an election cycle next year. Netanyahu looks firmly in power. Erdogan looks firmly in power for the next half decade. Much can change in five years. Ankara will want to push forward with those changes, such as investments in its arms industry and perhaps reconciling with the Syrian regime.

Time will tell whether the current “no tensions but not warmth” relations with Ankara continues, or whether Turkey hopes to benefit by creating a crisis with Israel. This could boil down to what happens in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and other unforeseen developments.

For now, the general trend toward diplomacy in the region mitigates against a downturn in ties. There is not much wind in the sails of any public upturn in ties either, however, because neither Netanyahu nor Erdogan is likely to benefit from any