A sharp new confrontation over judicial appointments broke into the open on Sunday after the Courts Administration publicized a letter in which Supreme Court President Isaac Amit, Deputy President Noam Sohlberg, and Justice Dafna Barak-Erez accused Justice Minister Yariv Levin of selectively advancing some judicial appointments while continuing to block broader staffing moves across the system.
The letter, dated Sunday and sent in response to Levin’s Friday notice to members of the Judicial Selection Committee, said Levin had finally acknowledged, “albeit after significant delay,” the damage caused by the continuing failure to convene the committee in a way that would fill the system’s missing seats.
The three justices wrote that the ongoing refusal to move on appointments was seriously harming service to the public, and they directly challenged Levin’s new plan as detached from the judiciary’s actual needs.
Levin’s own letter proposed what he cast as a first-stage reform focused on the traffic, family, and youth courts, along with immediate appointments to magistrates’ courts in the north and Haifa.
He asked committee members to submit candidates by May 3, said the names would then need to be published for 45 days as required by law, and set a June 7 committee meeting for the promotion of presidents of magistrates’ and youth courts to the district court.
Levin rejects Supreme Court picks over alleged veto
At the same time, he made clear he did not intend to open a process for appointments to the Supreme Court, arguing that his nominees had faced what he called a political veto and saying he would not agree to upper-court appointments under those conditions.
That position is the heart of the dispute. In their response, Amit, Sohlberg, and Barak-Erez said Levin was effectively exercising a veto he does not legally hold.
They argued that although the law gives him only one vote on the committee, he has used his control over convening it to impose, in practice, a broader blocking power over appointments and committee votes. They demanded that candidate lists and voting now proceed under the statutory framework, including majority votes for lower-court appointments.
The judges’ letter also attacked Levin’s allocation of appointments on the merits. While Levin said urgent reinforcement was needed in traffic, family and youth courts, and listed dozens of positions he wanted filled in those tracks, the justices said the figures in his letter appeared arbitrary and ignored acute shortages elsewhere, especially in the district courts in Haifa and Beersheba.
They attached a nationwide vacancy map stating that 67 existing judicial positions could be staffed in 2026, in addition to 18 new positions already set, and said the shortages were system-wide rather than confined to the categories Levin chose to emphasize.
They went further still, effectively trying to force the process forward. Citing the Courts Law, the three justices said they were sending the judges division their own proposed list of district-court candidates, based, for now, on objective criteria including seniority, a positive decision by the screening panel, and promotion within the relevant district.
They called on Levin to publish that list in the official gazette immediately, add his own candidates if he wished, and then convene five committee meetings over a two-week period after the 45-day publication window ends, devoted solely to judicial selections.
The exchange lands in the middle of a much longer power struggle between Levin and the judiciary over who gets to shape the courts. Levin has long argued that the appointments system has operated as a closed guild and that candidates, he says, would diversify the Supreme Court ideologically, have been blocked.
Critics, including the attorney general earlier this year, have argued that he effectively invented a veto for himself by refusing to convene the committee while insisting on “broad consensus,” despite ordinary lower-court appointments being decided by regular majority vote.
That broader backdrop has been a recurring feature of Israeli media coverage as well. Walla framed Levin’s April move as both an administrative court “reform” and a message to the Judicial Selection Committee that he would not allow Supreme Court appointments to be forced on him, while Haaretz highlighted the judiciary’s answer, accusing him of advancing proposals disconnected from the system’s real needs.
The ideological composition of the signatories is also notable. This was not only a letter from Amit, who has been in direct conflict with Levin, but also from Sohlberg, widely viewed as one of the court’s more conservative senior justices.
That gives the response added institutional weight and makes it harder to dismiss as coming from only one camp inside the court. The letter also underscores that the fight is no longer just over the four vacant Supreme Court seats, but over who controls the pace and structure of appointments throughout the entire judiciary.