Dr. Aaron Lerner is head of IMRA - Independent Media Review and Analysis, since 1992 providing news and analysis on the Middle East with a focus on Arab-Israeli relations.
Definition: When Israelis say there is a "goat" (in Hebrew, 'ez' / עז) in a proposal or negotiation, they mean a deliberate, annoying, or extreme demand that was inserted just to have something that could be removed later in those negotiations. (The term comes from the tale of the rabbi who told a man who complained that his home was too crowded to move his goat inside the house. When the man came back saying that the goat had exacerbated the problem, the rabbi told him to put it back in its pen, and the man gave a sigh of relief at how roomy the house now was, R.S.)
In an interview with Kalman Liebskind, Editor in Chief of Hebrew weekly Makor Rishon and published in that paper on September 24, 2026, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, in response to a question about the judicial reform: "I am not going into the tactical aspect, because I was legally barred from dealing with it."
In fact, in early 2023, after Netanyahu delivered a televised speech declaring he was taking over and stepping directly into the proposed judicial overhaul to resolve national rifts, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara issued a sharp public letter. She explicitly informed him that his statement and any tactical intervention were completely illegal and violated Supreme Court rulings because they created a conflict of interest as he was on trial for charges of alleged bribery et al (the trial is still ongoing and the charges still unproven).
The Prime Minister's fiercely objected to the order, branding it an unacceptable violation of his freedom of expression and a restriction on the mandate of millions of voters. His legal team filed a petition arguing that the restrictions went too far by completely blocking him from mediating or public speaking on the reform, but to no avail.
These developments deserve renewed examination in light of the events that shook Israel in 2023 - months of protests and riots which, it seems, gave Hamas leaders the impression that Israel was divided and defeatable.
It is precisely the word tactical that may be the key to understanding one of the central failures in the management of the judicial reform.
It is possible that if Netanyahu had been permitted to manage the reform, a significant portion of the public crisis that developed around it could have been avoided. Not because he necessarily opposed any of the reform, but because he had previously demonstrated the ability to change course sharply when he concluded that circumstances required it.
In legislative processes, it is sometimes customary to include far-reaching clauses known as "goats," with the intention of later removing them and creating room for compromise.
In the case of the judicial reform, there is evidence that this is exactly what was done.
In an article by Hilo Glazer published in the weekend magazine of Haaretz on 4 May 2023, under the headline "Extreme Pessimist, Ascetic, 'Snake inGlasses': Who Is Yariv Levin, Really?", it was written:
"At the beginning of the process, Levin told associates that he never intended for his plan to pass in its maximalist version, and admitted that he had planted many 'goats' in it. When he discovered that no one was willing to talk with him, he joked with his people that 'in the end the reform will still pass as is.' Over time his mood darkened and he expressed to his interlocutors genuine frustration at the feeling that on the other side there was no one to talk to'."
In other words, already in May 2023 it was published that the original wording of the reform was not necessarily the wording Levin intended to pass in the end. Some of the clauses were meant to serve as bargaining chips-those "goats" that were supposed to come out during the negotiations.
However, in this case, instead of waiting for negotiations during which the "goats" would be removed, the opposition turned the initial drafts into the focus of public protest and refused to discuss the plan.
People who were not necessarily sworn opponents of the government read the drafts as submitted and did not understand that this was a bargaining exercise.
Thus the clauses intended as a means toward compromise became a central tool for mobilizing opposition.
At that moment it was necessary to remove them unilaterally and present the public with a revised version, but at the same time a dynamic developed within Likud in which the initial drafts were increasingly presented as positions from which one must not budge. And Netanyahu, the expert negotiator, was forbidden by the court to do anything about it.
Instead of facilitating compromise, the "goats" became an obstacle on the way to it.
Already on 18 June 2023, an article was published in IMRA calling on Netanyahu to remove the "goats" and present the public with the reform legislation without them, under the headline: "Mr. Netanyahu, Let the Public See the Reform Legislation Without the 'Goats'."
Yet, as said in the interview, the prime minister was legally barred from dealing with the management of the tactics.
That is the tragedy: not that the solution was unknown, but that the person who might have implemented it was not permitted to do so.
We cannot know how things would have developed if Netanyahu had been free tomanage the reform, but it is worth re-examining the sequence of events and the heavy price the State of Israel paid due to the Attorney General's obdurate and inexplicable (except politically) stance on tthe matter.