Thursday, January 22, 2009

Nine wise people?

I am referring to the nine (or in one case eight) Israeli Supreme Court justices who overturned the decision to ban two predominantly Palestinian parties from running in the February 10 elections.


In a previous post, I joined many others in commenting that "[g]iven its track record, it is likely (though there is no guarantee) that Israel's supreme court will overturn the decision of the highly politicized Central Elections Committee." I am somewhat relieved that the court had the wisdom to do so, but it is not healthy for an alleged democracy to rely on appointed officials to "do the right thing." In fact, it is one of the factors that leads a democracy to being merely an "alleged" one...
I have pretty much hashed this issue in my January 12 post, so I'll leave it at that. It was just important for me to post an update today.

3 comments:

  1. did you see? one of america's old enemies has weighed in in favor of a one-state solution:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/opinion/22qaddafi.html

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  2. Thanks for that. Isratine, I like. I was thinking Semitistan, but there are too many -stans already.

    Thanks to the Qaddafi op-ed I also discovered the Pinker one, which is great reading for my Sociolx class. We were talking about virtually the same things today in class.

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  3. I disagree that Israel is an "alleged democracy" and i think that the strength of the Israeli Supreme Court shows that with all of it faults, Israel still does have a healthy political structure. And I am certain that with effective leadership, this structure can be used to bring israel to the right track.

    And in my opinion, there is nothing wrong in relying on appointed judges to do the right thing: see Brown v. Board of Education, Row v. Wade etc. etc. etc........

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