Episode Two: De-Mo-Krat-Ya!

There's the old joke about the two Jews having three opinions.

But in the case of the judicial reform, differences of opinion came in fast and hot.

Those like Rotman who drove it argued that the courts had too much power, the sort of unchecked authority that no judicial branch enjoyed anywhere in the world.

The sort of power that was being used daily to override decisions made by the democratically elected government.

Those like Roznai, who opposed the reform, argued that it was nothing more than a power grab by a right-wing cabal, disdainful of checks and balances and eager to bring the last remaining independent branch of government under its control.

Before we go any further, then, we should probably take some time to figure out what the judicial reform was really all about.

And what about it made so many Israelis so mad that they were willing to take to the streets again and again and again for months and years on end? So what exactly were people reacting to? It's obviously a complicated question, but we think the best way to answer it is to ask the person who basically wrote it.

His name is Moshe Kopel, and if you are expecting some fire-breathing ideologue, think again.

Doctorate in mathematics from NYU, postdoc work at Princeton, Kopel is a computer scientist, a pretty famous and accomplished one at that.

Now, you hardly need to be a math whiz to know that programmers love nothing more than solving problems.

And the biggest problem that irked Moshe Kopel for a very long time was, well, the fact that Israel had no constitution.

So he did a bunch of work trying to figure out what a series of legal reforms might look like.

And in 2012, he founded the think tank known as the Kohelet Policy Forum.

If you're trying to place it politically, think somewhere in the neighborhood of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, somewhere in the continuum between conservative and libertarian.

He hired scholars, he commissioned research, and he set out to answer some very hard questions.

I will let him describe them.

We spend years writing papers about each aspect of this.

So if it's what is the right authority for the attorney general, we write a paper, you know, 100, 200 pages.

What gets done in other countries in the world? What would work over here? What's special about Israel? What are our political traditions over here? Let's put all this together.

Then after we've written a paper like that, we go and we speak to decision makers and we try to explain to them why we think it's important.

And we had, in the case of judicial reform, we had spent 10 years doing this before we had an opportunity to actually move things

along.

Some lawmakers, especially on the right, agreed with what Coppel was trying to do.

Others, particularly on the left, were opposed, arguing that judicial reform was just code for trying to reshape the political balance of power in favor of Netanyahu and his somewhat precarious right-wing coalitions.

Some thought it was important enough to discuss, but weren't really willing to spend any political capital on an issue they deemed as not exactly sexy, not the sort of stuff that gets people truly riled up.