Clash with Second Authority Council is serious but not constitutional crisis - explainer

At the center of the dispute are two competing councils for the Second Authority, which regulates Israel’s commercial television and radio broadcasters: a new council appointed by the government in March; and an outgoing council that the High Court has allowed to continue operating while it hears challenges to those appointments.

The authority’s council is responsible for major regulatory decisions in the sector.

One decision that could come before the outgoing council is approval of the pending sale of Reshet 13, which operates Channel 13, to the Merit Spread Foundation.

Media organizations and public-interest groups petitioned the High Court against the government’s appointments, arguing that they were politically motivated. The court froze the new council’s activity and left the outgoing council in place while it considers the case.

Several members of the outgoing council then resigned, potentially leaving it below the minimum number of members required to operate.

In a June 17 interim order, the three-justice High Court panel cited the timing and circumstances of the resignations, including that most of those who resigned want to continue serving on the government-appointed replacement body.

To avoid having the resignations shut down the council before it could rule on the case, the court said the departing members would not count in calculating whether the outgoing council had enough members to function. That allowed it to continue operating and make substantive decisions.

Karhi said the two-thirds membership requirement was a legal condition, “not a recommendation.” Levin said the court could not give the council authority that the law did not provide.

Cabinet secretary Yossi Fuchs sought to distinguish between the cabinet’s declaration and an instruction to defy the court. The decision had not called on anyone to ignore a court order, he said. Instead, it reflected the government’s position that the ruling had contradicted an explicit legal requirement and would be challenged through legal avenues, he added.

Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara said the cabinet’s declaration had been a serious attempt to undermine judicial decisions and deter media-market actors from relying on them.

Amir Fuchs, a senior researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, said the declaration had been a serious escalation but not yet the kind of constitutional crisis in which a state authority openly refuses to carry out a final court order.

Fuchs drew a distinction between that narrower kind of institutional rupture and the broader conflict that, in his view, Israel has already been living through for years.

“On the broader definition, I think we are there, but not from today,” he said.

The underlying problem was structural, he said, adding: “The basic problem is that we don’t have a constitution.”

Israel has no single written constitution. Instead, the relationship among the branches rests on Basic Laws, many of which can be amended by an ordinary Knesset majority, court rulings, judicial interpretation, and political practice.

That leaves more room for dispute over the limits of executive power, judicial review, and the role of legal advisers, Fuchs said.

The clearest constitutional breaking point would come when a government body refused to comply with a final court order that requires it to take a specific action, he said.

That has not yet happened in the Second Authority case. The High Court’s order allows the outgoing council to operate while the petitions are decided, but it does not require the cabinet to appoint someone, hold a vote, recognize an officeholder, or carry out another specific act.

The cabinet has sharply disputed the order and said it would not recognize actions taken under it. But it has not yet been directed to take a specific action and refused.

A more direct confrontation would arise if the court invalidated an appointment or ordered a new vote and the government or another public authority simply declined to comply, Fuchs said.

At that point, the question would go beyond a disagreement between branches of government, he said, adding: “If the government is not abiding by the law, why should the citizens?”

That could create a “twilight zone,” Fuchs said.

If a court ruled that an official could not lawfully take office while the government insisted otherwise, civil servants would have to decide whose instructions to follow, security personnel might have to decide whether to allow the official into an office, and subordinate bodies would have to decide whether decisions made by that official were valid, he said.

Israel has approached versions of such a crisis before without reaching a prolonged institutional breakdown.

In 2020, then-Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein announced his resignation rather than comply with a High Court order to convene the plenum for a vote on his replacement. The court then authorized veteran Labor MK Amir Peretz to preside over the sitting and allow the vote to proceed.

Fuchs also cited the 2025 dispute over the government’s attempt to dismiss then-Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) director Ronen Bar. The High Court froze the dismissal, and the government later rescinded its decision after Bar said he would resign.

A more direct constitutional confrontation would have emerged had the government installed a replacement despite a contrary court order, Fuchs said.

The Second Authority dispute is unfolding as Israel moves toward elections due by late October. It is not an election-administration case, but it places commercial media regulation and judicial authority at the center of an already charged political period.

Israel needed clearer constitutional rules rather than another institutional confrontation, Fuchs said. There should be a Basic Law: Legislation that would set a more demanding process for passing and amending Basic Laws, making them harder for a temporary majority to change quickly, he said.

Israel lacked explicit Basic Law protections for equality, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and social rights, Fuchs said.

The outgoing council remains in place under the interim order, and the High Court has not yet ruled on the legality of the government’s March appointments.