A Quorum Fight Becomes a Constitutional Crisis
On July 5, 2026, Israel's cabinet voted unanimously to disregard a Supreme Court ruling protecting the operating authority of the Second Authority for Television and Radio, the country's commercial broadcast regulator. The resolution, proposed by Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi and Justice Minister Yariv Levin, declared the government would "not recognize any decision, approval, appointment or action" taken by the Second Authority's council in its current composition (Reuters/U.S. News). It is, by multiple accounts, the first time an Israeli government has openly declared it will not comply with a High Court of Justice ruling (The Times of Israel).
The dispute traces back to March 2026, when the government appointed new Second Authority council members — including chair Yifat Ben Hai Segev, a former Channel 13 advisory board member — in a move critics said was designed to seize political control of the regulator. On May 3, 2026, Justice Alex Stein froze those appointments pending litigation brought by the Union of Journalists in Israel and the Movement for Quality Government. In the interim, six of the sitting council's 15 members resigned, reportedly under pressure from Karhi, dropping the council to nine members — below the two-thirds quorum needed to act. On June 17, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled the outgoing council could keep functioning anyway, reasoning that a wave of coordinated resignations shouldn't be allowed to disable a statutory regulator by design.
Steelmanning the Government's Case
The government's underlying legal argument deserves a fair hearing before it's dismissed. The Second Authority for Television and Radio Law, 1990, sets out a fifteen-member council and specific quorum rules for valid decisions (Nevo legal database; Adalah, English summary). If a body genuinely cannot muster the members the statute demands, letting it rule anyway on consequential matters — like approving a change of control at a national television channel — creates real legal risk: any deal blessed by an under-quorate council could later be challenged as ultra vires, leaving buyers, sellers, and advertisers in limbo regardless of who's right on the merits. A government insisting its regulators follow their own procedural rules is not, on its face, an unreasonable position, and courts do sometimes get statutory interpretation wrong.
Why Unilateral Non-Recognition Is the Wrong Remedy
But there is a vast difference between contesting a ruling through further appeals and simply announcing you won't obey it. Israel's legal system offers the government every avenue to challenge the Supreme Court's June 17 reasoning — including seeking an expanded panel or new legislation clarifying the quorum rule. Instead, the cabinet chose fiat. Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara called the move a step that "undermines the basic principles of the rule of law" and warned it was designed "to intimidate anyone who seeks to uphold" court rulings (The Times of Israel). President Isaac Herzog was blunter still:
"Refusing to comply with a court ruling is a red line that must not be crossed under any circumstances."
Two days later, on July 7, 2026, a three-justice panel led by Supreme Court President Isaac Amit responded directly, warning that officials who defy rulings could forfeit personal civil immunity, and that noncompliance by state authorities is "all the more grave" than private defiance because "the distance between the rule of law and anarchy is a hair's breadth" (Jerusalem Post).
The Real-World Cost: A Frozen Media Deal
This is not an abstract separation-of-powers argument. Sitting on the council's docket is approval for a Merit-fund-led consortium — backed by Wiz co-founder Assaf Rappaport, a vocal government critic — to acquire Channel 13, a deal aimed at stabilizing a financially troubled broadcaster (ynetnews). Karhi opposes the buyer. Whatever one thinks of Rappaport's politics, letting a cabinet minister's personal objection to an acquirer override a regulatory approval process — by simply refusing to recognize whichever council ruling the minister dislikes — is precisely the kind of discretionary, personality-driven regulation that deters capital. Israel's tech sector has thrived in part because investors could trust that regulatory outcomes, even unfavorable ones, would be adjudicated by courts rather than overridden by whoever holds a ministry that week. A government willing to nullify a regulator's decisions on one deal, for one minister's stated reasons, cannot credibly promise it won't do so again on the next foreign investment, spectrum license, or content-moderation dispute that displeases it.
The Broader Stakes
Proportionate regulation requires predictable enforcement of the rules as written — by the bodies empowered to interpret them, with disagreements resolved through appeal, not decree. The government may well be right that Section 21's quorum language deserves stricter enforcement; that argument belongs in front of judges, not settled by cabinet vote. Media regulatory independence is a proxy for something broader: whether Israel's regulatory state, across telecom, data, and competition policy alike, remains bound by its own courts. Opposition leader Yair Lapid called the coalition "illegal" for the move, and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett warned of "anarchy in the streets." Those may be overstatements. But the quieter cost — a chilling effect on every investor now pricing in the risk that Israeli regulatory approvals can be unilaterally unwound by the government that dislikes their outcome — is not.