When Esther Hayut, a bespectacled woman with hair always neatly parted down the middle and pinned back with a barrette, was sworn in as the chief justice of Israel’s supreme court in 2017, she pledged to protect the country’s judiciary from politically motivated attempts to weaken it.
“It is the properly applied rule of law that serves as the glue which keeps our nation together … I pray that the justice system will not crack,” she told an audience that included Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
