Once again we have been thrown into an election campaign, and everything seems very personal - one person against another. But beyond the personal aspect, there are very fundamental questions here, concerning worldviews, faith, and the Jewish identity of the country.
It seems that the natural arena for deciding these questions is the ballot box.
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But in recent decades, we have discovered, to our great frustration, that the voters' decisions have no real meaning, and that the hands of elected officials are tied from fulfilling the mission entrusted to them by the public.
Unelected officials, and a legal system that also fails to stand public scrutiny, interfere in almost every detail of our lives, and exert their influence over elected officials.
The blatant intervention
The recent confrontation between the Minister of Public Security and the Attorney General illustrated this well. It is reasonable to assume that the general public is outraged by the order, which came following the demand of the Adalah organization, to vaccinate security prisoners - that is, the cruel terrorists, murderers of Jews - before vaccinating Israeli citizens, including the bereaved families and injured victims of those terrorists.
The minister rebelled, and quite rightly so, against this puzzling order, and the frontal confrontation broke out. But this is actually a sample of the entire distorted situation that has arisen - fundamental questions of worldviews are decided by officials, according to their positions and views, and not by the public.
This process began long before the concept of 'judicial activism' took hold. In fact, the entire problem of 'who is a Jew' was created by the Supreme Court's decision to intervene in this fundamental question, in the famous Shalit High Court case.
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It was in the winter of 1970, when an officer who married a non-Jewish woman sued the High Court of Justice to order the Ministry of the Interior to register his children as Jews. You may ask, where does the High Court have the authority to determine who is a Jew? Indeed, a good question. But the High Court decided that it was authorized to discuss this, and made a disgraceful decision, by a majority of five to four, ordering the Ministry of the Interior to register the children of the non-Jewish mother as Jews!
The High Court ruling caused a fierce storm, and as a result, the Law of Return was amended and it was determined that "a Jew is someone who was born to a Jewish mother or who converted, and is not of another religion." The amendment was incomplete, because the words "(who converted) properly" were omitted, thus opening the door to fictitious "conversions." In the following years, the High Court knew how to take advantage of this omission to recognize all kinds of empty "conversions.".
Return authority to the people
But then the High Court was forced to yield to the amendment accepted by the Knesset. When another petition was filed two years later to register children of non-Jewish mothers as Jews, the High Court rejected the petition, because the law already stated that such children should not be registered as Jews. However, today the High Court nullifies Knesset laws, thereby rendering elected officials irrelevant and elections meaningless.
Therefore, the most important thing is to return authority to the public and its elected officials. This is essentially what democracy means – rule by the people, not rule by officials, however respectable they may be.
If there is a debate about positions and opinions, about worldviews and values - the arena for decision should not be in court or in the offices of officials, but in the public.
This issue must be at the core of the election campaign, and the people must decide.
