In conversations on Israel and Palestine, I am often asked for my opinions on the internal resistance to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
My questionnaires highlight hundreds of thousands of Israelis who went down to the street to protest against the government and its efforts to introduce a judicial overhaul in the past two years and ask why I remain apathetic to these efforts to end the Netanyahu rule.
My answer is simple – the real problem to which Israel is not his current government. The government could fall, but until we radically transform the nature of the regime, little change, and especially not in relation to the fundamental human rights of the Palestinians. A recent decision of the Israeli Supreme Court underlines my point.
On March 18, 2024, five Israeli human rights organizations filed an urgent petition with the Supreme Court of Israel, asking the court to set up the Israeli government and soldiers to fulfill their obligations under international humanitarian law and meet the humanitarian needs of the civilian population in the midst of the catastrophic conditions in Gaza.
The petition was submitted at a time when the aid entered Gaza, but the amount crossing the border was far from sufficient to meet the minimum needs of the population, 75% of which had already been moved. The rights defense groups wanted the government to raise all restrictions on the adoption of aid, equipment and staff in Gaza, especially in the North, where there were already cases of children who died of malnutrition and dehydration.
The court has not made a decision for more than a year, effectively allowing the government to continue to restrict aid without control. Three weeks after the rights defense groups filed the request, the court only summoned to give an additional time to the government to update its preliminary response to the petition. This has set the tone for how the petition would take place over the next 12 months.
Whenever the petitioners have provided data on the worsening of the conditions of the civilian population and underlined the urgent need for judicial intervention, the court simply asked the government of new updates. In its update of April 17, for example, the government insisted that it had considerably increased the number of assistance trucks entering Gaza, claiming that between October 7, 2023 and April 12, 2024, it had allowed 22,763 trucks to cross the control points. This amounts to 121 trucks per day, which according to each humanitarian agency working in Gaza, does not approach the needs of the population.
In October 2024, at least half year after submission of the petition, the rights organizations asked the court to issue an injunction after the government deliberately blocked humanitarian aid for two weeks. In response, the government said that he had closely monitored the situation in northern Gaza and that there was no “food shortage”. Two months later, however, the government admitted that it had underestimated the number of Palestinian residents trapped in the north of Gaza – recognizing that the aid entering the band was insufficient.
On March 18, 2025, after Israel violated the cease-fire agreement and resumed its bombing of Gaza and the Minister of Energy and Infrastructure interrupted the supply of electricity to the band, the petitioners submitted another urgent request for a provisional order against the government’s decision to prevent the passage of humanitarian aid. Again, the court did not make a decision.
Finally, on March 27, more than a year after the rights organizations filed the request, the court rendered a verdict. Chief judge Yitzhak Amit and judges Noam Sohlberg and David Mintz unanimously ruled that he lacked merit. J. David Mintz intertwined his answer with Jewish religious texts, characterizing Israel’s attacks as a war of divine duty, while concluding that, “[The Israeli military] And the respondents went beyond to allow the supply of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, even taking the risk that the transferred aid reaching the hands of the Hamas terrorist organization and being used by it to fight against Israel. »»
Thus, at a time when humanitarian agencies have pointed out again and more acute levels of malnutrition and famine, the Supreme Court of Israel – both in the way it managed the judicial process and in its decision – ignored the legal obligation of Israel to refrain from depriving a civilian population of objects indicated in their survival, in particular by impatiently involving extensions. Indeed, the court has legitimized the use of famine as a weapon of war.
It is the court that hundreds of thousands of Israelis try to save. Its decision of March 27 – and almost all other decisions involving Palestinians – reveal that the Supreme Court of Israel is a colonial courtyard – which protects the rights of the settlers’ population, while legitimizing dispossession, the displacement and the horrible violence perpetrated against the native Palestinians. And while the Supreme Court may not reflect the values of the existing government – in particular on questions relating to political corruption – it undoubtedly reflects and has always reflected the values of the colonial regime.
Consequently, the liberal Zionists who fill the streets of such Aviv each weekend do not demonstrate against a judicial overhaul which endangers democracy, but against an overhaul which endangers Jewish democracy. Few of these demonstrators have real scruples on the horrible decision of the Court on humanitarian aid, or, moreover, on the way in which the court has constantly confirmed apartheid and Israeli colonial pillars. In other words, the regime can continue to eliminate Palestinians without hindering as long as the rights of Israeli Jewish citizens are obtained.
The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.
