The ambitions of attorneys and judges, the distortions in the separation of powers imposed on the democratic framework, and their striving for political power, cannot be detached from their self-image as the redeemer of the people and their rights. While this self-image has a core of truth, since the Court does protect individual rights even in regulation at the national level (for example, in reducing religious coercion), there is also a blatant exaggeration and quite a bit of arrogance. The main motivation of such jurists is not to power and rule their bodies, to exalt themselves and to overthrow those who stand in their way. These are usually straight, clean, patriotic and sensitive people who have convinced themselves that only they, in their enlightenment and dedication, can save their beloved homeland from slipping down the slippery slope toward the loss of fundamental values ​​and the destruction of human rights. Often this pretense involves righteousness and demagoguery, but the essence was a sense of mission. 

Members of the Order see themselves as the guardians of the walls of the moral and ethical norms of liberal democracy. That's what led them to a fascinating paradox: Because of the anxiety about sliding down the slippery slope toward the loss of these noble norms, they found themselves in uncontrolled gliding down a slippery slope: from legal oversight, to the heart of the political decision-making scene. In their defense it will be said that the boundaries between the two are not sharp; It is important for them to emphasize that they have crossed the border far beyond the legitimate degree - have fallen in love with their image as the Redeemer of man and the people, and have continued to surf it while ignoring its dangers.  

 Price is an ongoing process in which a significant proportion of citizens question the legitimacy of the status that jurists have dictated in the distinct political arena, in a way that erodes the public's trust in jurists and courts. One section of the public is usually built from the political decisions of the judges and the attorneys, giving their rulings a status of holiness. The prosecution for putting these decisions above legitimate criticism is more aroused by the loss of confidence in the doubtful camp. Soon, the legal system, which is not in its favor, is at the heart of political polarization, which characterizes many democracies in the last generation. Instead of an institution where the public respects the legitimacy of its rulings even when they are not visible, it is torn between the unfulfilled expectations of its adherents, and the suspicion of foreign judgments in its judgments, which nurture its critics.

Here's the place to stress: This is not a radical "leftist" legal establishment (certainly not anti-Israeli). Had that been the motivation, Aaron Barak would not have contributed to the fall of the first Rabin government (in the dollar bill) that brought the Likud to power. If that was the intention, it would not have been the same lightning rod, in his stance on the removal of Rabin's Oslo government, the loss of Rabin's Jewish majority, and the serious damage to his status even before the murder. The "leftist" High Court would not legitimize settling in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, against its alleged worldwide illegality, or the construction of the security fence. 

This is the deep commitment of many liberal democracy jurists, whose core is human rights, and therefore less attuned to the needs and preferences of voters. They find it difficult to accept that the decision on how human rights are integrated into democracy, which expresses the sovereignty of the people, is primarily a matter of social and political forces, and not of jurists.Their (sometimes unbearable) involvement in security and important national issues was indeed anchored in a much liberal system of values. More than the mainstream of The Israeli public, but mainly asked for the three interrelated areas, already mentioned here, 

the first is the fiery ambition of prosecutors and judges to dictate the nature of the state, or at least participate in national decisions, without the democratic mandate to do so; The self-image of the rescuers of liberal democracy and its values, which justifies the manipulative means of dictating their worldview in the name of the noble cause; the third, the sense of superiority of the "enlightened man" bordering some of them in Megalomania. This allows to formulate concepts such as "substantive democracy", the order of which is entrusted to, which overcomes "formal democracy", which we, mortals, are imprisoned in its limited concepts. For those who offer a different balance of considerations "there is an agenda", which is nothing but subversive heterodoxy, against the legitimate orthodoxy of human rights. These are not as dominant today as they were in the days of Aaron Barak and his emissaries, but the spirit of his "constitutional revolution" is still floating, and it is difficult to return to the bottle.

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