> The "basic laws" have been granted the status of a constitution by the courts themselves, as well as being accepted as such by the knesset and army.

That isn't true. There's no alternative to them and they currently can be enacted by a simple majority. This is the perfect example of such a simple majority enacting something that's clearly not within the public consensus.

> The courts power must be curbed.

Even if this is the case. There needs to be an alternative, you can't give all the power to one legislative body which is what the current law does.

> Every party, from left to right, has spoken out about the dangers of such a setup, but being as it is a strongly leftist court there is more howling from the right.

This is absolute nonsense. The right likes to yell that because they need a scarecrow. But this isn't the case by any measure. The court has two settler judges despite their weight in the population being 5% hence they should have no judge. Arabs are 21 percent (excluding the occupied territories) which should give them 3 seats but there's only one justice.

About the decisions, the court lets them enact things like blowing up houses of families of terrorists (collective punishment isn't legal internationally). It gave extra monetary compensation to people cleared from Gaza (against the governments wishes). It enforced laws blocking Jews from working on the sabath and essentially did what the government asked when it was LEGAL!!!

But think about this clearly. If they were so bad why did they just attack them now? Why not go after them before?

Because the court lets Israel show to the world that it's a democracy while it still keeps 3 million people under military rule. It's a facade that the right has used for decades as part of the "occupied territories" trick. To the Israelis they say "the court is liberal". To the west they say "we're a democracy".

The courts enable the right to have its cake and eat it. The people driving Bibi are the idiots who don't understand that trick. Once the courts are weakened there's no protection against international sanctions.

> All that the current law said was that the court needs to base law on precedent, reproducible logic, or written law, and cannot just use a hand-wavy

No.

This is the first part in many different laws they plan to past. So pointing at that is very disingenuous.

That ignores the cases where the law was used. E.g. this was used to protect a woman (who was living in a settlement btw) whose electric power was disconnected despite her poverty and the fact that her child depends on machines to live.

This was used to stop terrible appointments.

One of the excuses for the law was the desire to appoint a person who was convicted TWICE of crimes while in office. Who testified in front of the court that he will leave public life (and was granted clemency), he then made a 180 and only one year later demanded a ministerial position in the government.

This wasn't used much but every single use of this ruling is against VERY extreme circumstances. Judges should have some ability to use a bit of common sense when faced with the level of corruption we're already seeing from the current government.

Just so we're clear, the opposition was OK with a law that required a greater majority of the judges to agree to that. But the coalition refused a reasonable compromise.