People in senior positions want power and power. Judges are human beings. Hence the judges also have ambition. Anyone who is up and running for senior positions - in politics, the military, the clerical, the academy, the prosecutor's office and the court - has an ambition of his own. At best, he wants it to advance what he thinks is his worldview that is necessary and justified, accompanied by the satisfaction, status and prestige associated with his achievements. He wants his authority and power to exceed those of his competitors, who are striving for other goals. Without this impetus, it would not have reached the top positions. 

This impetus, the ambition, is essentially positive, provided that the power will not only accumulate for power and lead to tyranny. Without it, human companies would not be able to effectively strive for desirable goals, led by worthy leaders. This is not only the supreme political leadership, but also the professional leadership in all areas, including science, the economy, and even the spiritual realm. The democratic method is not intended to sterilize this impulse, but to regulate competition for power and power resources, to redirect it to constructive and nonviolent avenues, to decentralize power to prevent tyranny, and, in particular, to strengthen and deepen the relationship between authority, responsibility and public oversight, to establish a stable, flexible social order. And sustainable.

The core of the democratic system is the sovereignty of the people, who freely choose his representatives to shape his name, parliament and government, the national decisions, and he will replace them if and when he believes that he failed or rose to office. Alongside the elected system stands a legal system that was not directly elected by the sovereign and whose senior officials are not interchangeable. This is intended to balance the array of forces, to set limits on the arbitrariness of elected leadership and the tyranny of the majority, and to ensure the rights of all citizens. Because we learned from a long and bitter experience that unrestricted power is inherently corrupting, a strong and independent legal system was designed to restrain the "rule of law", which also requires and applies state leaders. The authorities - the legislature, the executive and the judiciary - are interdependent in a system of balances and brakes. So far everything is more or less agreed.

But the jurists, like any senior, want more power. In the name of "rule of law" and as the representatives of the law in their eyes, they are not satisfied with the status of a warning light on the clock board and in extreme cases to operate the brake system to prevent a fatal accident; Some look up to the driver's seat or, at least, want to rest their hands on the steering wheel. In the name of "rule of law," some of the top prosecutors and top judges want a veto on travel destinations and every decision, small or large, concerning the way there. Such an ambition is legitimate, but in a democratic regime, to do so must persuade the sovereign, be elected and stand up for the trial of the people, who will test your personality and performance and remove you from your position if you fail. Most importantly, you must accept responsibility for the results of your decisions and convince this public that they have hired you in pursuit of one justified goal, will not lose out against other justified goals, in a way that disrupts the overall national balance. Some of the judges and their doers, in recent decades, have been unwilling to bear this price. They want to get a license and the car keys without passing a "test" to the public, without the possibility of revoking their license if their driving has led to repeated accidents, and without accepting responsibility for the wrong choice of travel destinations.

And their way of achieving all this is to misuse the authority entrusted to them by the public. The consulting authority distorted the dictate authority, and the jurisdiction distorted the administrative authority. The public has the authority to restrain the arbitrary power of the politicians' ambitious service, and they have also used it to establish legal arbitrariness, in their own ambitious service. Because no one oversees them, as they oversee (and better yet) the Legislature and the executive, they "legislate" for themselves, in their legal precedents, a superior real-time Supreme Court appeal on almost every political decision, including decisions that are largely at the discretion of elected officials , Without being held responsible for its consequences. The motivations of some senior judges, the principles of the political apparatus and the special circumstances that enable them to act in this way, are important to describe clearly and broadly, even at the expense of the nuance. The following articles will be devoted to this.

Dr. Dan Schifften is the head of the International Security Program at the University of Haifa and lecturer in security studies programs at Tel Aviv University