There are about 80,<> lawyers in Israel, many of whom voted Tuesday in elections for the head of the bureau and its institutions.
The Chamber has the authority to appoint two representatives to the Judicial Selection Committee. A lawyer has a hundred times more influence on the identity of judges than an ordinary citizen. Beyond the inequality and lack of democracy, the chamber's representatives and senior members also appear before the judges they help choose.
In the last elections, the candidates were divided into "good guys" and "bad guys" according to their attitude toward reform. But only a few have asked why we should give so few so much power, relying on an inherent conflict of interest. The Chamber is not only an inherently anti-democratic body, even if its delegates are elected in elections – the membership of its representatives on the Judicial Selection Committee also undermines the due process of the rule of law.
The Israel Bar Association is not the only autonomy in Israel – hundreds of bodies in Israel skip above the Knesset, and especially above the Israeli public:
In a democratic country where there is equality and freedom, a person can choose to be a dairy farmer, but not in Israel. While anyone can become a teacher or a high-tech worker or a truck driver, a dairy farmer can only be someone who holds a quota for milk from the Dairy Council. Even a lulan can only be someone who holds a lid for eggs. Anyone who encounters empty milk shelves at the supermarket should understand that he is denied his right to buy milk because there are restrictions on the dairy farmers' freedom of occupation. The chicken coop and dairy farming industries are a state within a state in Israel.
Until privatization a year ago, the ports committee in Ashdod and Haifa would decide whether goods would enter Israel. Neither the Knesset, nor the government, nor the courts, but a forklift at Ashdod Port would have decided on us. Each port committee member has more power than tens of thousands of people at the ballot box.
Three months ago, at the peak moments of the struggle against the reform, the Airports Authority Committee decided to shut down Ben Gurion Airport. Here, too, several hundred people erased the wishes of millions.
The teachers' union actually determines what they will teach, how much they will teach, and who will teach. The quality of teaching in Israel is among the lowest in the Western world, because the education system is a country within a country that no one can touch. The Israeli citizen stands helpless in the face of the statutory mediocrity of the education system.
For several months now, there have been long lines for issuing a passport outside the Population Authority offices. If there was such a queue at McDonald's, they would open more stations, or extend hours, or open another branch, or invest in technology. But the role of the authority is not to provide passports, but to provide convenient jobs with operating times of several hours a day. The struggle over passport queues is not a struggle for citizens of a democratic country who want basic services, but a struggle of a union that does not want to work long hours, or, God forbid, recruit workers. The Population Authority is also a state within a state.
The influence of the Israeli citizen on his life is very limited – because he is not a real citizen. The State of Israel exists within the borders between the various principalities that comprise it. The Israeli citizen is stuck between the artificial queue at the post office or the Ministry of the Interior and the political desires of the members of the Bar Association, and the kindness of the production councils to supply him with eggs and milk, and the gatekeepers at the ports, Ben Gurion Airport or the Standards Institute, who will decide whether he will go abroad or whether he will receive goods that arrived from abroad.
Even if you do not support judicial reform, fairness requires admitting that democracy in Israel is flawed and that citizens' ability to influence their lives through elected representatives is very limited. In defending against the tyranny of the majority, we have created a tyranny of a minority. Instead of being an egalitarian state of law, we have divided our rule of law into hundreds of principalities, small, independent, sovereign entities with tax authority, strikes and vetoes over government decisions, without any transparency, accountability or equality before the law.
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