And Israel’s anti-democratic imperious Supreme Court justices decide that right now would be a good time for a major constitutional crisis and showdown.

Let me explain.

Israel’s Supreme Court is populated by elitist imperious justices who do not think that their enlightened decisions should be constrained unnecessarily by silly requirements like a demand that they be based on Israeli LAW! It is sufficient that a judicial diktat be based on the general sentiment popular among the enlightened quarters of society, which of course means secularist leftists.

The willingness of the Supreme Court justices to substitute their prejudices for what is written in the LAW has escalated in recent years and has been the subject of many a posting from these quarters. Nevertheless, the Court has avoided a full scale No-Holds-Barred Showdown with the Knesset.

Until now.

Yesterday the Court outdid itself in its most brazen act of judicial activism to date.

The background to this has to do with debate in Israel over the status of conversions, especially within the framework of the Law of Return. The Israeli Law of Return grants automatic citizenship to any Jew from anywhere applying for it, short of drug dealers and major criminals. But that begs the legal question of who is recognized as a Jew for purposes of the Law. No one feels comfortable with the idea of third-rate secularist politicians passing rules for defining what is essentially a religious criterion, but this became unavoidable once the Law of Return was passed.

The Knesset adopted the traditional, that is the halakhic, definition of a Jew, as being someone born to a Jewish mother or someone who converts to Judaism. (Someone born to a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother has the second option; someone born to a Jewish mother and non-Jewish father is registered as a Jew unless he/she requests otherwise.)

The problem of course was always the second part of the definition, regarding conversions. The Orthodox were reluctant to accept non-Orthodox conversions as valid for purposes of the Law, and the Reform and Conservative movements took that as an affront and felt the law in Israel delegitimized them. For decades the conflict was kept under control with a sensible compromise: within Israel, conversions had to be supervised by some acknowledged person applying traditional halakha, meaning an Orthodox Rabbi or someone delegated by such a Rabbi, but any person coming to Israel from abroad with ANY conversion certificate from ANY Rabbi, no matter how flaky or Tikkunesque, would be accepted at face value. For all intents and purposes, this defused the issue.

Honest people can of course disagree over how conversions to Judaism should operate. The argument for Orthodox conversion was to conduct it so that the person’s offspring could be accepted in marriage by anyone from any strain of Judaism in the distant future. Some objected that in a country where secularists were the majority of the population, it was unreasonable to require a convert to demonstrate Orthodox-levels of knowledge and commitment to religion. (On the other hand, there is actually some precedent in Judaism to requiring converts to know MORE and demonstrate greater commitment than other Jews.)

The objections by the Reform and Conservatives to rules that appeared to ostracize them were understandable. But the determination by the Orthodox to delegitimize the Reform, in particular, was also understandable as long as so many of the Reform around the world were trying to reduce Reform Judaism to leftist political correctness, homosexual marriages, and opposition to school vouchers and globalization. You did not have to be Jewish to like Levy’s Rye Bread and you did not have to be Orthodox to suspect that some crank Reform Rabbis would issue conversion certificates to anyone who could tell a joke that begins with "A Rabbi, a Minister and a Priest walk in," or who could say ten words in Yiddish. On the other hand, non-Orthodox conversions have a way of "upgrading themselves" asymptotically over time, in the sense that virtually all men of dubious conversion in Israel will marry Jewish women and so have Jewish children in the halakhic sense, and half the children of women of dubious conversion will be male and resolve the issue the same way, and so on - 50% at a time - for each residual generation.

But as I say, tensions were contained and the system worked reasonable well in Israel under the compromise described above.

And into that tranquility burst the Supreme Court yesterday. The Court ruled that the Israeli government must acknowledge and accept all non-Orthodox conversions performed WITHIN the country. There was, as usual, no parliamentary law upon which the Supreme Court based this learned opinion. It was yet another act of judicial activism and appeal to the prejudices of the self-knighted "enlightened".

Now you may not see the constitutional crisis in this yet. After all, the Court just ordered that Israeli Law, which already accepts non-Orthodox conversions performed abroad, will now accept those performed within Israel, presumably even including those "secularist conversions" proposed a couple of years back by Yossi Beilin based on converts demonstrating their commitment to Judaism by voting for the Labor Party and preparing felafel.

The constitutional crisis alluded to comes from the fact that the religious political parties in the Knesset will demand and pass a new bill in the parliament that overrides the Supreme Court provocation. They will pass a new conversion law that nullifies the Court ruling, declaring only Orthodox conversions acceptable, and they might even escalate and declare non-Orthodox conversions abroad - earlier accepted as part of the compromise - to be invalid in Israel. The Labor Party and Likud will vote with them for fear of alienating large partners needed for any present or future coalition.

AND THAT IS WHEN THE CRISIS WILL BE UPON US. It will be the Old Mexican Standoff. It will be a major constitutional confrontation of the branches of government with no basis for resolution. There will be a Court ruling and a new Knesset Law that overrides it. Such which will stand? If Israel had a written constitution, that would provide the answer. But it does not. Which means it could very will be that the gridlock will only be resolved through appeal to force - in other words, whoever controls the army and police will determine which rule holds as law. Just like in Zimbabwe. And that is likely NOT to be the Court.

The entire crisis and locking of horns could have been avoided had the arrogant justices of this Court comported themselves with a smidgen of judicial restraint. But the Supreme Court of Aharon Barak believes in aggressive judicial activism and was pining for just this kind of a constitutional showdown.