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When Israeli lawmakers handed a deeply contentious legislation final Monday to weaken the Supreme Court docket, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t linger within the voting chamber to have a good time.
As an alternative, the justice minister, Yariv Levin, an architect of the laws, stayed to pose for selfies with fellow lawmakers as Mr. Netanyahu walked somberly from the room. Mr. Levin, not the prime minister, made a celebratory speech from the rostrum.
“We’ve made step one within the essential historic technique of repairing the justice system,” Mr. Levin mentioned. The prime minister was not there to listen to him.
To the world, Mr. Netanyahu — Israel’s longest-serving chief — is the face of his authorities’s judicial overhaul, a multipart effort that has already restricted the Supreme Court docket’s affect over lawmakers and will but give the federal government extra management over who sits on the court docket.
In Israel, the legislation’s fundamental champion has been Mr. Levin, whose solemn demeanor conceals a inflexible perception in sweeping judicial change. His affect inside Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition has raised questions concerning the prime minister’s true grip on energy and aroused hypothesis that Mr. Levin might at some point succeed him.
For many of his profession, Mr. Netanyahu was a proponent of judicial independence, and altered place solely after being investigated for corruption in 2017 and positioned on trial three years later, a prosecution that continues immediately. However Mr. Levin entered politics to reshape the judiciary, making it the topic of his maiden speech to Parliament in 2009.
“It’s one thing that Yariv Levin was dreaming of for many years,” mentioned Simcha Rothman, a fellow lawmaker within the coalition and one other architect of the legislation.
Mr. Levin’s recognition inside Mr. Netanyahu’s occasion, Likud, helps to elucidate why the prime minister has charged forward with the overhaul, regardless of setting off maybe the gravest home disaster in Israeli historical past — frightening avenue unrest, mass resignations inside the army reserve, fears amongst traders and large rifts in society.
Mr. Levin’s upbringing amongst outstanding right-wing leaders helps illustrate the historic grievances that compound these social tensions. And his extra speedy motivations for in search of judicial change present why the standoff has change into a proxy for a a lot wider dispute over construct a state that’s each Jewish and democratic.
All through his 14 years in Parliament, Mr. Levin has persistently proposed overhauling the court docket’s membership and diminishing its position as a result of, in his view, it doesn’t prioritize Israel’s Jewish character.
As a secular Jew, his animus differs from that of ultra-Orthodox Jewish allies, who resent the court docket for opposing the monetary subsidies and exemptions from army service that some governments have awarded their group.
Mr. Levin is a hard-line nationalist who opposes Palestinian statehood, and he has condemned the court docket for making it simpler for Arab households to maneuver to Jewish neighborhoods inside Israel; for evicting Israelis from some Jewish settlements within the occupied territories; and for permitting Palestinians to make use of a significant freeway within the West Financial institution that was beforehand solely open to Israeli residents.
The court docket seeks to construct an Israel that’s “not a Jewish state beneath whose aegis a democratic life is lived, however quite a democratic state by which, insofar as is feasible, a Jewish life can also be lived,” Mr. Levin mentioned in his first speech to Parliament.
“I shall act to revive the justice system to the traditional Zionist monitor,” he added, “in order that, within the Jewish-democratic equation, the Jewish character of the state will obtain the decisive weight it deserves.”
Mr. Levin, 54, declined a number of interview requests for this text, however associates, allies and former colleagues mentioned that the central tenets of his political outlook have been cast whereas he was an adolescent.
Mr. Levin was born in 1969 in Jerusalem. His “sandak,” Hebrew for godfather, was Menachem Start, a frontrunner of the Israeli proper who was ostracized for years by the nation’s left-leaning institution till turning into prime minister in 1977.
Mr. Levin’s great-uncle helped command the Altalena, a ship that ferried arms to Mr. Start’s right-wing Jewish militia in the course of the 1948 Arab-Israeli struggle. The ship was notoriously wrecked that summer season by the official Israeli armed forces, throughout a tussle for affect within the early weeks of the state’s existence, an episode that is still hurtful to the Israeli proper.
By the point Mr. Levin was conscripted to a army intelligence unit within the late Nineteen Eighties, these unhealed sores had left him resentful of the aristocratic class that dominated the state at Mr. Start’s expense, in line with Yuval Elbashan, a fellow conscript who has remained in shut contact with Mr. Levin for greater than three a long time.
“He was in opposition to all of the elites,” mentioned Mr. Elbashan, now a legislation professor, who shared a room with Mr. Levin. “It’s nonetheless their state, in Yariv Levin’s opinion.”
After Mr. Elbashan joined Mr. Levin on the Hebrew College in Jerusalem, the place they have been each legislation undergraduates within the early Nineteen Nineties, he discovered that Mr. Levin’s anger at elites had consolidated into a selected resentment of the Supreme Court docket. On the time, Parliament had simply handed a legislation that gave the Supreme Court docket far better leeway to strike down future laws. The court docket’s high judges had greeted it with enthusiasm — enraging Mr. Levin.
“He turned like a prophet,” Mr. Elbashan recalled.
Mr. Levin started work as a business lawyer in 1996, shortly dovetailing his authorized profession with political activism for Likud. He joined the board of the Israeli Bar Affiliation in 1999, as a part of a various slate led by a left-wing lawyer, Shlomo Cohen, and later turned vice chairman.
Even then, Mr. Levin’s antipathy towards the court docket was clear. After the retirement in 2006 of Chief Justice Aharon Barak, the decide most related to the enlargement of the court docket’s powers, Mr. Levin persuaded his affiliation colleagues to snub Mr. Barak by scrapping the customized of publishing a e book in honor of the departing chief justice, mentioned Mr. Cohen, then the affiliation’s president.
“He’s a really trustworthy man — what you see is what you get,” mentioned Mr. Cohen, who stays in contact with Mr. Levin regardless of their variations. “He was nearly obsessively important of what he erroneously perceived to be judicial activism.”
Mr. Levin’s requires judicial change have been lengthy ignored by extra reasonable members of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition, together with Mr. Netanyahu himself.
When provided the justice ministry in 2015, Mr. Levin turned it down as a result of he feared coalition allies would stymie his imaginative and prescient, in line with Mr. Elbashan, who spoke to him on the time.
“If he can change into minister of justice, however he can’t do what he thinks, he would like to not do it,” mentioned Mr. Elbashan.
Mr. Levin’s probability lastly arrived final November, when Mr. Netanyahu was re-elected to energy on the helm of an solely right-wing coalition.
Mr. Netanyahu then shaped a authorities drawn primarily from ultranationalists, settler leaders, ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders, and Netanyahu loyalists indignant on the judiciary’s choice to prosecute him for corruption.
Backed by coalition leaders who all had causes to help his imaginative and prescient, Mr. Levin seized the second, unveiling his plan on Jan. 4, only a week into the federal government’s time period.
His preliminary plan would have given the federal government extra management over the collection of Supreme Court docket judges and allowed Parliament to overrule the court docket’s selections.
These proposed modifications set off what has change into one of many longest-lasting mass protest actions in Israeli historical past, forcing Mr. Netanyahu to halt the plan in March in opposition to Mr. Levin’s needs.
They returned in early July with a distinct invoice to strip the court docket of one of many judicial instruments it makes use of to overrule authorities selections. As soon as once more, it prompted an enormous surge of protest, and there have been hopes among the many opposition that Mr. Netanyahu would once more droop the laws.
However this time, the prime minister appeared unwilling or unable to restrain Mr. Levin.
The justice minister has his personal base amongst Likud members, completed first in Likud’s primaries final 12 months, and is taken into account a attainable future occasion chief.
If Mr. Netanyahu halts the overhaul, analysts say it might immediate Mr. Levin’s resignation — probably collapsing the coalition.
Mr. Elbashan, who has helped lead mediation efforts between the federal government and opposition, says the coalition might survive his departure. However Mr. Netanyahu however needs to placate him as a result of he has few extra shrewd or loyal ministers, Mr. Elbashan mentioned.
“When you ask me, Yariv is the one who’s in management,” mentioned Mr. Elbashan. “Yariv could be very useful to Netanyahu, so useful that I’m unsure that Netanyahu can do with out him.”
Throughout last-minute efforts to compromise, Mr. Levin, not Mr. Netanyahu, appeared to have the largest say.
Moments earlier than the ultimate vote in Parliament on Monday, the protection minister, Yoav Gallant, one of many authorities’s most reasonable members, pleaded with Mr. Levin to vary his thoughts, stay tv footage confirmed.
Mr. Netanyahu watched in close to silence, largely a passive witness.
And Mr. Levin shrugged.
Jonathan Rosen, Hiba Yazbek and Gabby Sobelman contributed analysis.
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