Ayelet Shaked: I changed the DNA of the legal establishment
Following her New Right party’s failure to make it into the current Knesset and the decision to move toward re-run elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired Shaked as justice minister.
By YONAH JEREMY BOBJustice Minister Ayelet Shaked (Bayit Yehudi).(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
In her parting speech at the Justice Ministry in Jerusalem, Shaked said she “definitely plans on returning” to the post in the future.“I changed the DNA of the legal establishment,” Shaked said in the speech.Shaked’s main point was that she had started an irreversible conservative counter-revolution to quash what she had described as a judicial activist revolution started by former chief justice Aharon Barak in the mid-1990s.The outgoing justice minister said that the “train” of the legislative branch asserting its superiority relative to the judicial branch had left the station.She said that she had planned to continue her revolution for another four years, but that even now that she would not have that opportunity, the changes she made over the last four years were so significant that a future justice minister could not undo them.During her term, Shaked appointed hundreds of new judges, including 40% of the current sitting Supreme Court, with many new appointees being more conservative than past appointees.Shaked still struggled with the Supreme Court ruling against government policies multiple times on the African migrants’ issue and some other issues, but on Tuesday she said that the direction of the court and of the justice ministry were far more conservative.Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit and State Attorney Shai Nitzan both complimented Shaked on seriously investing in the role of justice minister despite lacking a formal legal background.Both admitted to having different opinions than her on a variety of policy matters, but also said that she was a fair negotiator who was willing to reach sensible compromises.They added that even where no compromise was reached, she always addressed them with the attitude of respectfully agreeing to disagree, noting also that she defended them from personal attacks from politicians, even when that defense was politically unpopular.
