At the end of a spectacularly tense day in the Knesset, and a vote count that lasted a nail-biting two hours, members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition on Wednesday helped elect an opposition candidate to the panel that selects Israel’s judges, while overwhelmingly opposing its own candidate for the panel’s second slot. That outcome makes no sense whatsoever — except in the upside-down, highly unstable world of current Israeli politics.The narrow election of Yesh Atid’s Karine Elharrar to the Judicial Selection Committee may have temporarily staved off a wave of intensified nationwide protests against the Netanyahu government’s planned judicial overhaul, and could turn out to have prevented the total collapse of talks under the aegis of President Isaac Herzog on alternative proposals for judicial reform. But it could also have the opposite effect. READ MORE
