Aharon Barak’s one-bedroom apartment in central Tel Aviv was intended as a place for a quiet retirement after his career as Israeli attorney general and later Supreme Court judge. When Mr. Barak, now 86, moved here from Jerusalem 13 years ago, he placed his collection of unusual walking sticks – more than 200 pieces – by the front door. He hung his wife’s oil paintings on the walls. And his wife, Elisheva, also 86, put her easel near the sliding doors to their small garden.
But now the house of the Baraks is less besieged than besieged.
Crowds have regularly gathered in the leafy street outside in recent weeks to accuse Mr Barak – who retired 17 years ago – of being a dictator, a criminal and even an enemy of the state.
“Look, it’s not the way I planned my aging,” Mr Barak said in an interview this week, shortly before another vociferous protest began outside. “It’s an exceptional situation,” he said. “But we are in an exceptional situation.”
Mr. Barak, a Holocaust survivor who helped make peace with Egypt, is in the crosshairs because he once led and helped strengthen Israel’s Supreme Court – a legacy that the right-wing government now wants to unravel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition has proposed a judicial overhaul to give the government greater control over the selection of the court’s judges, limit the court’s influence over parliament, and give lawmakers the power to override court decisions .
After massive demonstrations persuaded the government to withdraw its proposal – for the time being – Mr Barak’s house became a focus of protests by the coalition government. supporters, hoping to spur it on to move forward with the plan.
“He’s the enemy,” said Hagai Himmelblau, 53, an engineer who protested outside Mr Barak’s home. “Election after election, the right wing wins, but we can’t govern,” Mr Himmelblau said. “He’s the one who started it all, the one who caused it.”
As a Supreme Court justice for 28 years until 2006, including the last 11 years as the presiding judge, Mr. Barak was involved in many of the most controversial decisions, including the ban on most forms of torture by the security forces and the ruling against government policies that prevented Arabs from living in certain Jewish areas.
Throughout his career, Mr. Barak strongly supports expanding the court’s jurisdiction; in 1995 he wrote a groundbreaking decision that allowed the court to strike down laws it deemed unconstitutional.
It has done so more than 20 times since then, rejecting approval of certain Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank — a move that angered the pro-settlements — and nullifying legislation that exempted ultra-Orthodox Jews from military service , which is the religious right.
For many secular Israelis, Mr. Barak is an icon as he tries to keep Israel both Jewish and democratic, while judges abroad see him as a totem for judicial independence. United States Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan has described him as “my judicial hero.”
But for right-wing Israelis, as well as some conservative judges in the United States, Mr. Barak placed too much power in the hands of an unelected court at the expense of democratically elected lawmakers.
“He is without a doubt a great lawyer,” said Daniel Friedman, a former Israeli justice minister and arch critic of Mr Barak, in a 2009 documentary about the judge. But “Barak treats the statutes of Parliament as a rough draft that needs to be rewritten,” said Mr. Friedman.
Mr Barak said his judicial ideals were partly shaped by his youth. Born in Lithuania in 1936, Mr. Barak was almost 5 when Nazi soldiers occupied his town of Kovno, now Kaunas. They murdered thousands of Jews and rounded up thousands more, including his family, in the Kovno ghetto.
Mr. Barak survived after being smuggled to another part of Kovno in a sack and then taken in by Lithuanian peasants. He immigrated to Palestine with his parents in 1947, the year before the creation of the State of Israel.
This experience taught Mr. Barak three things, he said: the need for a Jewish state as a homeland for the Jewish people; the need for that state to protect individual rights, including those of non-Jewish minorities; and the need for the courts to help resolve the inevitable tensions between those first two principles.
“It is my job as a judge to find a solution that suits them on every point,” said Mr Barak.
The right says triangulation caused Barak’s court to worry too much about Palestinian rights and not enough about Israel’s security. when it stopped intelligence officers from using the torture methods often targeting Palestinians under interrogation. Leftists say his court has too often been an apologist for Israeli superiority, such as when it supported building a wall nearly 430 miles (700 km) long to limit Palestinians’ access to Israel from the West Bank, requiring only relatively minor changes to the law. route were ordered.
Mr. Barak’s fluid understanding of the nature of a Jewish state has also drawn backlash. Ultra-conservative Jews want to rule Israel according to Jewish law. But according to Mr. Barak, a Jewish state must be shaped by the looser concept of Jewish values, which includes interpretations of the Jewish scriptures, but also the ideas of secular Jewish thinkers.
“The Bible is the source of our relationship with this country,” Mr Barak said in the interview. But, he said, “it’s not the only source.”
Mr. Barak comes from a family of lawyers. His father was a lawyer. His wife, whom he met in high school, was also a prominent judge. Their three daughters and son have all trained as lawyers, and they have all gathered in their parents’ apartment during the recent protests as a gesture of childlike solidarity.
After spending the early part of his career as a law professor, Mr. Barak made his life in public service in 1975 when he was appointed Attorney General under Yitzhak Rabin, who was then Prime Minister.
Mr. Barak eventually prosecuted Mr. Rabin’s wife, Leah, after she was found to have a bank account in the United States, which was illegal under Israeli law at the time. The episode forced Mr Rabin to resign and contributed to a subsequent electoral victory for Likud, the right-wing party Mr Netanyahu now leads.
Menachem Begin, then leader of Likud, appointed Mr. Barak as a negotiator in the Camp David peace talks with Egypt in 1978. President Jimmy Carter credited the subsequent sealing of a peace treaty – Israel’s first with an Arab country – in part to the meticulousness of Mr Barack. “Camp David’s hero throughout the process was Aharon Barak,” he said.
Appointed to the Supreme Court in 1978, Mr Barak helped gradually increase the number of cases the court heard, often arguing that without judicial intervention the government will always prevail over the individual.
“Who rules in a situation where the law does not apply?” he said. “The one who has the power.”
But critics felt he took that approach too far in the 1990s, when he helped direct the process of court judges occasionally overruling legislators.
Parliament itself started that process by passing legislation that enshrined fundamental human rights. In doing so, lawmakers recognized that the court would now have to quash future laws that infringed on those rights. But Mr. Barak wrote one of the landmark rulings in 1995 confirming that the court was capable of doing so.
“Have I managed to write a page in our legal history?” Mr. Barak reflected later, in a 2006 retirement speech. “Only history can answer that.”
The government’s revision plan makes that a less hypothetical question.
Some will say he “wrote a footnote but not the page”, suggested Mr Barak, while others will say “he wrote too many pages”.
Myra Noveck, Jonathan Rosen, and Carol Sutherland contributed research.