Congratulations to Prime Minister Netanyahu for winning in the Knesset a first step in judicial reform and for doing so in such a democratic fashion in one of the most exuberant democracies in the world. President Biden’s reaction — to lecture the Israeli leader that a measure of such magnitude shouldn’t be allowed to squeak by — is condescending nonsense, particularly from a president who gained passage of his own economic program by slim votes.*

We understand that this is only part of the battle over Israel’s Supreme Court. The measure passed yesterday is calculated to end the ability of the Supreme Court to nullify laws and political appointments that the justices deem to be “unreasonable.” That is a practice that emerged from the activist Supreme Court of its president Aharon Barak, who ruled over the court in the 1990s and moved it far to the left.

It’s a mystery to us why Mr. Biden — or anyone else — is so lathered up about this particular point. No one in America would countenance our own Supreme Court hauling off and, say, overturning laws or cabinet appointments simply because they are, in the view of the justices, “unreasonable.” Yet that is how Israel’s Supreme Court expelled from the cabinet a leader of the Shas religious party, Aryeh Deri. It’s a symptom of a runaway court.

What happened yesterday, in any event, was itself a democratic compromise. Mr. Netanyahu has agreed to wait until November for the various parties to try to reach a broader compromise on other elements of judicial reform — say, the participation of some of the justices themselves in the selection of members of the court. That’s another practice that not a single senator in America, of either party, would countenance in respect of our own high bench.

Much is being made by the left, in both America and Israel, of the danger that Israel’s democracy might not survive the fracas over this bill. Reservists in Israel’s defense force are threatening to refuse to show up for duty. Medical doctors, too. The most impressive thing about the drama unfolding in Israel, though, is Israel’s democracy itself. The protests have gone on, the press is at full tilt, and the scene in the Knesset was as raucous as could be.

In other words, democracy is functioning as it should. No mass arrests. No one is being “disappeared.” Democracy is often messy, and one could say the more turbulent, the more democratic. Yet, save for some isolated incidents, there has been little violence over this in Israel. What a contrast from our own country during the protests of, say, Black Lives Matter or Occupy Wall Street. No Israeli leader hectored America back then. 

The truth is that what we’re seeing in Israel is what one would expect from any healthy democracy or any country of laws. And why not. This is a fight over laws that are being made or reformed. Those refusing to defend the county or those physicians who protest by betraying the Hippocratic oath will, if there are violations for civil disobedience, be held accountable by the laws of the country. They are unlikely to have a major impact on the outcome.

The British foreign office joined the chorus, chiming in on Tuesday that the United Kingdom urges the Israeli government “to build consensus and avoid division” over the judicial overhaul. Do they remember the long campaign to prevent Brexit? Yet, unlike Mr. Biden, London at least started its message by noting that “Israel’s exact constitutional arrangements are a matter for Israelis.” Not that the rest of us can’t learn from Israel’s example.

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* Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill of March 2021 and his Inflation Reduction Act of August 2022 each passed the Senate by a margin of one vote.