Attack on Israeli judge’s home exposes deepening rule-of-law crisis

The images were shocking: dozens of ultra-Orthodox protesters smashing windows and overturning flowerpots at the private home of Israel’s deputy Supreme Court president, Noam Sohlberg. The deputy president’s wife, Meira Sohlberg, was heard crying: “What is this, Kristallnacht? That Jews would do such a thing to Jews?” By dawn, police had arrested more than 60 rioters, but the unprecedented intrusion—the first time a senior judge’s residence had been physically violated in such a manner—had already sent tremors through the judiciary and beyond.

The Supreme Court’s president, Isaac Amit, called it “crossing a red line” and an attack on the entire legal system. Yet for many Israeli observers, the attack was less a surprise than the culmination of a three-and-a-half-year campaign of systematic incitement against the courts. Senior politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, rushed to condemn the violence—but critics note that the same cabinet ministers have long delegitimised the judiciary and dodged responsibility for enforcing military conscription among the ultra-Orthodox, leaving enforcement bodies as targets for mob anger. In the Israeli English-language press, commentators warned of a “normalization of selective obedience” that threatens democratic function.

From within the ultra-Orthodox community, the picture is complex. One coalition lawmaker, Yitzhak Goldknopf, condemned the rampage while coupling his rebuke with criticism of the justice system’s crackdown on yeshiva students. Satirical commentary in the haredi press highlighted the irony of a government that has promised a draft-exemption law yet abandoned the institutions trying to enforce the existing statute. Such ambivalence points to a deeper communal sense of victimhood that militant factions are willing to act upon.

Arab-language media reported the developments as an unprecedented escalation in a society already riven by the war in Gaza and domestic polarisation. Analysts in European capitals, where Israeli judicial independence is closely watched, see the Sohlberg attack as part of a dangerous global pattern of political pressure on courts. The immediate future is bleak: no legislative compromise on conscription is in sight, and the government’s denunciations ring hollow while its coalition partners continue to shield the ultra-Orthodox from the draft. Israel’s democratic resilience is being tested in the streets—and now at the doorsteps of its judges.