Israeli Supreme Court Justice Anat Baron has been assigned additional security detail after receiving a death threat in the mail over the weekend. The letter apparently made veiled reference to Justice Baron’s son, who was killed by a suicide bomber in 2003.
This is grotesque and illegal behavior, and was immediately condemned by Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. But Netanyahu himself has been accused of inciting this type of behavior, given his ongoing verbal attacks on the judiciary as he fights for his political life. The parallels to President Trump’s assaults on American judges are hard to ignore.
To be clear, neither Netanyahu nor Trump can possibly be said to wish physical harm to judges with whom they disagree. But rhetoric matters, and when politicians of any stripe wage war on the judiciary as part of their partisan battle plan, they do bear some responsibility for the collateral damage, both to judges’ reputations or (worse) to their physical well-being.
The Interdependent Third Branch 