On January 4, 2023, new justice minister Yariv Levin dropped a political bombshell that would reverberate across the government’s entire four-year term, with enormous repercussions for Israeli society.
Just seven days into his new job, Levin told a press conference in the Knesset that he would drastically change Israel’s legal and judicial frameworks, laying out a plan that, once enacted, would remove practically all restraints on executive and legislative power from Israel’s system of government.
Having barely discussed the idea of legal reform during the campaign leading up to the November 2022 election, Levin, backed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, set the new government on a course to radically overhaul constitutional arrangements keeping government power in check that had developed over the course of decades.
Levin’s reform agenda spawned a massive protest movement unparalleled in the history of the country, in which hundreds of thousands of citizens took to the streets and campaigned ferociously against the proposed reforms.
That protest movement ultimately succeeded in stymieing the most radical aspects of Levin’s overhaul agenda in the spring of 2023, and the government failed to make any significant progress on the initiative before the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack reordered the government’s priorities.
