The Israel law of succession was passed many years ago as part of the Foundational Law: The Government. The law says that if the prime minister is temporarily unable to fulfill his obligations, the deputy prime minister will take over. If 100 consecutive days pass during which the deputy prime minister officiates and the prime minister does not return to his duties, he will be seen as someone who is permanently unable to discharge his duties, and the entire government will be considered to have resigned until a new government is formed.
Those who wrote and passed the law, like all flesh and blood that cannot foresee all the consequences of a law, left a lacuna that is critical. It was clear to everyone involved in passing the law what was meant by "unable to fulfill his duties." A prime minister who is unable to continue in his position due to health problems — physical or emotional — like Menachem Begin or Ariel Sharon for their respective reasons, is certainly considered to have become disabled. It never occurred to anyone that a government official could get up and declare a prime minister to be disabled for any reason. As long as he has not been convicted of a crime, he should continue to serve as prime minister.
No one disputes that the dry text of the law does not deal with the sort of "essential" disability like they are trying to impute to Netanyahu because of his so-called conflict of interest with regard to his legal position and the judicial reform. The law does not define disability and just says that the prime minister is unable to do his job. The obvious understanding is that there is some technical physical or emotional issue that prevents him from serving as prime minister, and not an essential-fundamental issue in his serving. As former chief justice Beinish said in one of her conferences with the protesters, "The ones who passed the law never in their wildest dreams imagined a disability of this kind."
Beinish admits: The legislator certainly did not intend this interpretation. Belatedly, the Right realized that the current court might well interpret the law totally against the intentions of the legislators in order to force the prime minister out of office for purely political reasons.
Therefore they made the obvious clarification of the law to make it perfectly clear what the intent of the law is for disability. They clearly intended that since the law is an amendment to one of the Foundational Laws it is not subject to judicial review.
This was clear until Mrs. Chayut, the current chief justice, including a Foundational Law and including such an obvious and purely clarifying amendment. If the judges will go off the rails and determine that nonetheless Netanyahu can be forced into disability, they will be responsible for what follows.
