KVIG Informative

The Knesset just removed one of the last checks on Israel’s executive branch, and it did so five months before an election the ruling coalition is favored to lose.

Israel’s parliament voted 65-51 on Wednesday to pass a law stripping the attorney general’s legal opinions of their binding force on the government. The vote followed more than eleven hours of filibustering, first by the opposition and then by members of the coalition itself.

The law does three things. It lets ministers reject the attorney general’s legal positions, which have been binding on the executive branch for decades. It strips the office of its exclusive authority to represent the state in court, opening the door for the government to hire outside counsel at taxpayer expense when it disagrees with the attorney general’s reading of the law. And it hands the coalition control over how the attorney general is appointed and fired, replacing a process currently run by a committee led by a retired Supreme Court justice.

MK Simcha Rothman of the Religious Zionism party sponsored the bill and chairs the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, where it was written. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu skipped the vote. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich did not. He congratulated Rothman afterward and said the coalition would spend the coming years finishing what he called the necessary reforms to the judicial system.

Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara opposed the bill before the vote and has said it will violate the rule of law. The government tried to fire her in August 2025. The High Court of Justice struck that decision down on procedural grounds. This law rewrites the procedure so the government does not run into that problem again.

Democrats party chair Yair Golan accused the coalition of trying to steal the election by removing a check on its power ahead of the October 27 vote. MK Gilad Kariv, who left Labor for the Democrats, filed a High Court petition against the law within hours of passage, joined by the left-leaning Zulat Institute. Dr. Amir Fuchs, a senior researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, told the Times of Israel the law would let the government carry out actions contrary to law with only High Court petitions standing in the way, calling it the elimination of a critical check on executive power.

The law takes effect in January 2027, two months after the election. The government has 30 days after that to write new rules for appointing and removing the attorney general. Whoever wins in October inherits an office with less power to stop them than the one Netanyahu’s government just spent eleven hours fighting to gut.

The law arrives alongside a separate bill making its way through committee this week to overhaul Israel’s broadcasting sector under Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, and a third bill already passed this month shielding Haredi draft dodgers from arrest. Kariv called it a pattern: weaken the gatekeepers, then run the election with fewer of them standing.