The house in Tel Aviv from which retired judge Aharon Barak left this week at the age of 87 to represent Israel at the hearing in The Hague is the same one that he could not leave just a few months ago, when dozens of supporters of judicial reform promoted by Benjamin Netanyahu – the same head of government who has now approved her appointment – they surrounded her with banners calling her a “dictator” or “head of the snake” for her role in the Supreme Court for 28 years (1978-2006). , the last 11 as president.
It happened in that Israel before the Hamas attack on October 7, in which a deep social and political division reigned triggered by the controversial reform. Already retired and in his eighties, the judge ended up becoming, despite himself, a symbol. For the right, he represented a secular elite of European origin who exploited the toga to boycott the results of the polls. For the liberals who took to the streets for months, the guarantee of a separation of powers was in danger, so they also surrounded his house, but to thank him and sing the national anthem.
Today, all of them unitedly support the war in Gaza. And Netanyahu himself, criticized by Barak, was the one who gave the green light to the appointment for him to be the judge representing the country at the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, in a “show of the seriousness with the one in which Israel takes the dossier,” says Amijai Cohen, PhD in Law from Yale University (United States) and researcher at the Israeli Institute for Democracy analysis center.
This Thursday, at the beginning of the hearing, South Africa asked the court for precautionary measures so that Israel immediately suspends military operations in Gaza and the opening of proceedings for violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). . The lawsuit includes statements – from the president to musicians, including several ministers and military leaders – that, in their opinion, show genocidal intent and promote its commission.
His appointment was widely applauded in the country, except for the most radical members of the Government. The Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, described it as an “error” taken behind his back, while the Minister of Legado, Amijai Eliyahu, also a far-rightist, questioned whether he had the “correct notions on the subject” under debate. One of the architects of the judicial reform, the president of the parliamentary Justice Commission, Simja Rotman, bit his tongue. “My silence is thunderous,” he limited himself to writing on social networks. Not so Tally Gotlib, a Likud deputy who does not usually do so and who accused Netanyahu of “humiliating the right” with the decision and of “detesting the voters” of the party in which they both belong.
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The appointment has several symbolic elements. One is to bring to The Hague the most important judge in Israel's 75-year history, famous for his judicial activism. He was the first to determine in a ruling the right of the Supreme Court to annul any rule that conflicts with any of the now 13 basic laws by which Israel is guided in the absence of a Constitution. He himself knocked down twenty. Added to this is his prestige in legal fields abroad. He has an honorary doctorate from renowned universities, such as Yale or Oxford.
Another is the message of national unity in the face of the world's showcase of sending a figure critical of Netanyahu. “He is probably the greatest jurist in the history of the country. and the attacks [de la derecha] “This year they have only reinforced their status before the world, as someone who confronts the Government,” says Cohen by phone. The expert also believes that the decisions in The Hague navigate “halfway” between politics and the purely legal, so the appointment “sends a message” of moving the field to the latter. “The political decision would have been to choose another candidate,” he adds. In a WhatsApp group shared by members of the Government, the Minister of the Interior, Moshe Arbel, considered that the choice was “very reasonable, particularly for the international scene,” according to national public television.
Barak's biography adds another symbolic element. The jurist who will defend Israel this Friday against the accusation of genocide survived one as a child. A farmer took him hidden, in a shipment of potatoes, from the ghetto of Kaunas, his hometown, where the Nazis imprisoned the Jews after invading Lithuania.
He would end up arriving with his family in Palestine in 1947, a year before the creation of the State of Israel. In the seventies, already as legal advisor to the Government, he forced the fall of Isaac Rabin's first Executive because his wife, Leah, had an account in dollars, something prohibited at that time. When Likud, the right-wing party that Netanyahu now chairs, ended three decades of Labor hegemony, he retained his position. The new prime minister, Menachem Begin, included him in the negotiating team for the peace agreement with Egypt (1978). On a shelf in his office he has a photo of that moment signed by the president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, who calls him “my good friend.”
Another paradox of his life is that he was presiding over the Supreme Court when the same UN International Court of Justice declared illegal in 2004, in a non-binding opinion, the separation wall that Israel had begun to build in the West Bank. Barak – who presided over the Israeli Supreme Court throughout the Second Intifada (2000-2005) – gave the green light to the barrier, ordering only some variations in the layout. He also calls for targeted killings, restricting them to causing “proportionate” harm.
The small Israeli anti-occupation left has always seen him as the friendly face of an oppressive system. In fact, the activist and president of the executive committee of the human rights NGO Btselem, Orly Noy, recently regretted that he had put on “the mantle of Dr. Jekyll to once again legitimize the crimes of Mr. Hyde.” [Israel]”.
In an interview with this newspaper last May, when he was on everyone's lips for judicial reform, Barak assured that his career as a judge had been marked by the “search for balance” between two lessons he learned from living through Nazi persecution: “importance” of the existence of the State of Israel—“if [los judíos] If we had had a State in 1941 or 1939, there would have been a Holocaust, but in a different way,” he said—and the value of human rights, because “the ghetto is the tyranny of unlimited power.” This Wednesday he apologized on the phone for not being able to grant another interview, given his new assignment.
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