Of course, not every parent who spanks his or her child will actually be prosecuted. What makes this verdict breathtaking is not only the fact that at one fell swoop it turned half the parents in Israel into criminals. Equally audacious is the fact that it did so without the slightest sanction in law. Some countries, such as the Scandinavian nations, have laws explicitly forbidding corporal punishment. In other places, such as Britain, Canada, and several states of the United States, the law explicitly permits corporal punishment by parents as long as it is moderate and reasonable.
Israeli law does neither.
Existing legislation against assaulting and abusing children neither criminalizes nor exempts corporal punishment explicitly. But the fact that a majority of the country might disagree has never stopped the court from declaring itself the sole arbiter of society's values. They do not even have the justification of being our elected representatives. Yet they believe they are qualified to declare by fiat how our entire society should feel about this issue. This mother's disciplinary methods, in addition to frequent spankings, included throwing shoes at her children and hitting them with rubber clogs.