The court's manufactured crisis

The Yesh Atid party's petition to the High Court of Justice against leaving the Health Ministry under the charge of Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman has brought a bear out of the woods.

Justice Hanan Melcer followed the twists and turns in legislation, and came to the conclusion that a new situation has been created, and the prime minister cannot also function as a minister in his own government, except in limited circumstances and for short periods.

Immediately following Melcer's statement on Monday, the court's enemies lamented as if the judges were seeking to usurp the government of the country from the Knesset. Their tunnel vision did not allow them to understand that Melcer was just making a professional diagnosis. Why be angry? It is like being angry at a doctor who finds an abnormal result in a patient's blood test. This is just a tempest in a very shallow petri dish.

Melcer's comments may be correct, but this does not mean he gets the final say. Until this week no one ever thought a prime minister could not also serve as a minister in his own government. Israel has a long list of people who have held the dual title "prime minister and defense minister": David Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, Menachem Begin (albeit briefly), Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak. In the 1950s, Prime Minister Moshe Sharett was also foreign minister. Now it is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's turn.

This is not a desirable situation. Changes to the wording of the law caused the prime minister to lose this right without his opinion being sought. Perhaps this time the judges are going to advise the prime minister to end the practice of deputy ministers functioning as de facto ministers, despite this being long-standing practice in Israeli politics. National Religious Party leader Haim-Moshe Shapira once was nominally both the health and the internal affairs minister, but in practice it was Deputy Health Minister Yitzhak Raphael who was in charge.

One person holding multiple portfolios often occurs when trying to form a coalition. During Begin's first government, Yoram Aridor held almost half the ministerial portfolios. Who was counting-

Although Melcer's interpretation is correct, it seems to me that his colleagues on the bench will most likely recommend that the government reinstate the provision that allowed the prime minister to hold multiple portfolios, but will not cause embarrassment by placing a deadline on the correction, thus allowing the Litzman-Netanyahu power-sharing arrangement to stand. Until this week these arrangements were a non-issue, and in 67 years of statehood no one has ever questioned them. They have come up in the context of legal hairsplitting and not because there is any public debate on them.

We now have two options: The High Court of Justice can either let Melcer's comments speak for themselves, or the Knesset can reword the relevant law. A coalition comprising only 61 MKs is crisis-prone, but not because the health portfolio is partly or fully in Yakov Litzman's hands.