Demands by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich to empower the Knesset to overturn human rights rulings would make Israel vulnerable to prosecution at the International Criminal Court (ICC), Professor Alan Dershowitz has told the JC.
The plan would make it harder to resist calls for the ICC to investigate Israelis for alleged war crimes, Prof Dershowitz warned. “The risk would be quite high,” he said.
Prof Dershowitz said this week he had warned top Israeli officials including incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the danger posed by such a move.
“The ICC can’t investigate a country that has a fairly operating legal system,” he said.
“At the head of the legal system in Israel is the Supreme Court. It ain’t broke, and it doesn’t need to be fixed, so why break it?”
Mr Netanyahu’s incoming coalition partners Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionist Party, and Itamar Ben Gvir, of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, want to strip the court of its power and to change the constitution so its judgments can be reversed by politicians.
“They think the Supreme Court is too leftist, too elitist,” said Prof Dershowitz. “Well, supreme courts with judicial review powers are supposed to be elitist, and they’re supposed to focus on human rights.
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Benjamin Netanyahu
“But so long as it applies the law fairly — and Israel’s Supreme Court has applied the law fairly — it shouldn’t be tampered with, and that is the advice I have given everybody in Israel.”
Harvard law professor Mr Dershowitz, whose high-profile legal clients have included boxer Mike Tyson, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and former American football star and actor OJ Simpson, told the JC he was dismayed by the demands of Mr Netanyahu’s right-wing partners.
He singled out Mr Ben Gvir’s claim that “an Arab throwing a rock” should be treated more harshly than a Jew. Prof Dershowitz said: “That’s not acceptable… I am a zealous Israeli advocate, but I cannot defend Ben Gvir’s suggestion that the rules … should depend on the ethnicity of the person throwing the rocks.”
Such proposals, he said, were “making it much harder to defend Israel” .
Prof Dershowitz was also scathing about coalition politicians’ calls for the Law of Return to only apply to “Orthodox” Jews. He added: “Israel has responsibility to the Jewish people around the world. I just don’t think Israel should be trying to reduce the number of Jews by adopting [an] interpretation as to ‘who is a Jew’ for immigration purposes.
Itamar Ben-Gvir
Right winger Itamar Ben-Gvir (AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP)
“Israel is a place of asylum, and it should define ‘who is a Jew’ broadly.” He pointed out that many of the greatest Zionists had been secular, such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky and David ben Gurion.
Prof Dershowitz said he held a long meeting with Mr Netanyahu last weekend, and was convinced that despite his new partners, he planned to govern from the centre.
“He will be a tough prime minister,” Prof Dershowitz said, “and he will have red lines. He looked me in the eye and he said, ‘there will be no pushing back against the basic rights of people under my administration’.”
He said he believed that “Bibi is glad I’m doing what I’m doing.”
He added: “It gives him a little more ammunition to try to move his government to the centre when he can say that dear friends of Israel like Alan Dershowitz are deeply concerned about how to defend Israel in the court of public opinion.”
Prof Dershowitz also discussed the Jeffrey Epstein case and the abandoned lawsuit brought by Virginia Giuffre who claimed he was among a number of men with whom the disgraced financier compelled her to have sex. She later dropped the allegations.
Earlier this month, the JC reported how Prof Dershowitz said he could now conclusively prove through his travel records he was not in any of the locations where when she claimed to have met him.
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Bezalel Smotrich (Getty Images)
“It’s now clear I was the victim of a frame-up”, he said, “and every reasonable person can now understand that I did absolutely nothing wrong. This isn’t a grey area. It’s a black-and-white area.”
He questioned why none of the lawyers who supported those claims had been forced to account for their actions. He said: “There’s a big difference between accidental false allegations and deliberate frame-ups.
"The people who do the deliberate frame-ups, like in my case, should be prosecuted, imprisoned and disbarred for perjury and the suborning of perjury. People cannot be allowed to get away with it.”
