Netanyahu hits back at attacks on judicial reform

“The opposite is true,” PM Binyamin Netanyahu declared in a news conference Wednesday night in response to a warning from 270 economists that his government’s judicial overhaul would lower Israel’s credit rating and harm the economy. The reform would strengthen the economy, Netanyahu maintained, by releasing the wheels of economic progress from over-exposure to extraneous judicial roadblocks. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich added that few people appreciate how unnecessary judicial intervention boosts the costs of transactions and how the “Barak revolution” placed the most credible business contracts at high risk.

Thursday, five university presidents joined the widening chorus of dissenters from the judicial overhaul plan, maintaining it would generate brain drain, dry up international funding, deter academics and students from coming to Israel and isolate Israel’s academics from the international community.