Irwin Cotler sounds alarm on erosion of Israel’s greatest protection – its democracy

Irwin Cotler sips his coffee at a corner table in the lobby café of his Tel Aviv hotel. He’s visiting Israel once again, but is less a tourist than a part-time resident. Though born and raised in Montreal, Cotler speaks Hebrew with his Israeli wife, Ariela, and divides his time between Canada and Israel, where several of his children and grandchildren live.

His voice unflinching and sense of humor as sharp as ever, the 85-year-old Canadian lawyer, scholar, former cabinet minister and activist made time in his packed schedule for a lengthy conversation with The Times of Israel, where he is an editorial board member.

Cotler is also here to open the annual strategic workshop of the eponymous Irwin Cotler Institute for Democracy, Human Rights and Justice at Tel Aviv University — in many ways the culmination of his nearly 60-year efforts to preserve and bolster Israeli democracy.

It is a democracy that he today sees threatened by the government’s ongoing attempts to rebalance the power between the judicial and legislative branches. This power play, he says, inadvertently has put the Jewish state in existential danger.

“The obsessive preoccupation with the judicial overhaul led Iran and others to see Israel as so divided,” he says, adding that Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s insistence on implementing it even after the horrors of October 7 is “the definition of insanity.”

Few figures outside government — let alone a non-citizen — have been as intimately and consistently entwined with Israel’s modern history.

Over the past half-century, the celebrated human rights defender’s frequent visits to Israel have had an uncanny tendency to coincide with moments of national crisis, prompting his friends to long joke, “Tell us when you’re coming to Israel so we know to leave.”

True to pattern, on the morning of October 7, 2023, Cotler was in Tel Aviv, having just celebrated his son’s wedding the week before.

As red alerts sounded, Cotler and his granddaughter were preparing to walk to synagogue. Then came the sirens — and the videos.

“She turned to me and asked, ‘Saba, are we going to die?’” Cotler recalls. His granddaughter had seen the footage Hamas was posting in real-time — scenes of murder and abduction, broadcast proudly.

“I’ve never seen anything like it — and I’ve worked on the prosecution of Nazi and Rwandan war criminals,” says Cotler. “Even the Nazis tried to hide what they were doing; Hamas glorified it.”

‘I’ve never seen anything like it — and I’ve worked on the prosecution of Nazi and Rwandan war criminals. Even the Nazis tried to hide what they were doing; Hamas glorified it’

Thousands of Hamas-led terrorists launched a full-scale invasion of southern Israel that day, slaughtering some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and abducting 251 to the Gaza Strip.

Beyond the horror at the atrocities, which included acts of torture, mutilation and sexual assault, Cotler expresses sharp frustration at what he sees as a strategic failure in Israel’s response, particularly the failure to secure the release of the 50 hostages still being held in Gaza.

“Every day they remain in Hamas captivity is a crime against humanity. Their immediate and unconditional release is a standalone imperative under international law,” he says.

Cotler argues that Israel missed a critical opportunity after October 7 to frame the hostage crisis as part of a broader global pattern — one that includes Iran and its proxies, like Hamas, using hostage diplomacy to exert pressure.

“Iran detains dual nationals, boasts about imprisoning and torturing dissidents, and Hamas operates as one of its arms,” he says. “Democracies need to defend political prisoners and stand in solidarity with the Iranian people, not the regime. That same principle should have guided the international response after October 7.”

But he says that Israel did not even try to pursue this track.

“Israel did not need to face Hamas alone. It could have mobilized an international coalition and averted the war,” says Cotler.

“It never mounted an integrated legal, diplomatic, political and military strategic plan. Instead, it relied solely on military strategy with no day-after plan, and even that hasn’t worked as it should have.”

From Montreal to Jerusalem

It’s hard to overstate the breadth of Cotler’s influence. A towering figure in 20th- and 21st-century human rights law, his name carries particular weight in Canada, where he’s revered across party lines and within the Jewish community. There, Cotler is seen not just as an advocate, but his very name is synonymous with justice.

A former Canadian justice minister, attorney general, longtime member of parliament and professor of law at McGill University, Cotler gained international acclaim for defending prisoners of conscience such as Natan Sharansky and Nelson Mandela. He later served as Canada’s first Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism and founded the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.

Two central themes of Cotler’s life have been an unabashed and enduring commitment to the pursuit of justice and to the Jewish state, both forged in the post-war Montreal of his youth, where Cotler was taught at his Jewish day school by Holocaust survivors of “horrors too terrible to believe, but not too terrible to have happened.”

Among his teachers was the incendiary poet Irving Layton, who instructed his students in poetry and Marxism and referred to both Cotler and Leonard Cohen — Layton’s protege and a lifelong friend of Cotler’s — as “his children.”

Cotler’s father, a synagogue president and communal leader, would intone the biblical commandment, “Justice, justice you shall pursue,” as if it were a family oath, but it was his Maimonides-quoting mother who gave that oath its urgency.

“If you don’t go out into your community and combat injustice, then the pursuit of justice is just a theoretical abstraction,” he recalls her instructing him.

Haunted by the Holocaust, surrounded by prophets, mentored by poets and called to justice from his earliest days, Cotler came of age in a world that shaped a lifelong connection to the Jewish state — one later forged through war, witness and a lifetime of unlikely encounters.

Israel’s unofficial envoy

Cotler’s life often reads like historical fiction. He first arrived in Israel in 1966 on a Hebrew University fellowship. When the Six Day War broke out, he tried to enlist in the IDF but was rejected. Instead, he joined the civil defense force and went door-to-door in Jerusalem, urging people into bomb shelters.

He returned again in 1973 when the Yom Kippur War broke out to “do whatever I could,” and ran into Cohen, who was performing for soldiers in the Sinai.

It was in the 1970s, when Cotler would spend months in Israel nearly every summer, that he began acting as an unofficial envoy between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

At a time when Jews had only recently fled the Arab world following decades of persecution, Cotler quietly crisscrossed its capitals: lecturing in Cairo, meeting the remnants of Syria’s Jewish community in Damascus, and venturing to Jordan and the Palestinian territories.

He wasn’t an ambassador, nor a spy, nor yet a statesman, but a young Canadian law professor at McGill University with an instinct for where history was turning and a talent for stepping into its stream at precisely the right moment.

While teaching one summer at Cairo’s Al-Ahram Institute in the 1970s, Cotler struck up an improbable friendship with its head, Boutros Boutros-Ghali — then a rising Egyptian diplomat, later UN Secretary-General. Despite Israel and Egypt still being formally at war, Ghali invited Cotler to lecture about Israel.

In 1977, Ghali, now Egypt’s foreign minister, arranged for Cotler to meet then-president Anwar Sadat, who wanted his take on Israel’s newly elected Likud government. Could peace be made with Menachem Begin?

“I told him: Yes. I didn’t know Begin myself, but I did know him to be a dedicated parliamentarian,” says Cotler. “He would want to make peace with the largest and most important Arab country.”

Sadat entrusted the 37-year-old Canadian Jew, whom he felt both sides could trust, with a message to be delivered personally to the Israeli prime minister.

Cotler flew to Jerusalem, where a young Knesset aide named Ariela met him with suspicion. “She thought I must be a spy,” Cotler laughs. But after hearing his story, she arranged the meeting with Begin.

Cotler delivered Sadat’s conditions for peace: a full Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and recognition of the rights of the Palestinian people. Begin hesitated.

“Nu, be’emet,” Begin said, roughly translating to, “Come on, really.”

“I can’t agree to those two conditions,” he said.

Cotler replied, “He’s not asking for agreement. Just dialogue.”

Cotler and Ariela married on March 26, 1979 — the very day Israel and Egypt signed the first peace treaty between the Jewish state and an Arab nation, which they had helped deliver.

It marked the beginning of Cotler’s decades-long role as a roving diplomat in a region where titles matter less than trust. He maintained a strong connection with King Hussein of Jordan and visited Gaza regularly, moving through areas many others avoided, and was likely the first Jewish parliamentarian to visit Saudi Arabia. He later defended Saudi dissident Raif Badawi and submitted a petition to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman based on Islamic law.

Cotler, a lifelong advocate of the two-state solution, maintained longstanding ties with the Palestinian Authority, including regular meetings with former PA foreign minister Riyad Malki and PA President Mahmoud Abbas until October 7.

At the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, which Cotler attended as an informal observer, he recalls Khaled Abdel Shafi, head of the Palestinian delegation, telling him, “I’m a Palestinian nationalist and I wish Israel had never existed, but it does. I need to make peace with it for my people’s sake.”

He also told Cotler of a group growing in strength that he warned would “one day be a menace to my people as well as yours” — Hamas.

A democracy in crisis

Long before October 7, Irwin Cotler was sounding the alarm. The threat he saw wasn’t only from the Iranian regime — of which he has been a lifelong critic and target — or from Hamas, but from within.

“I am worried about the erosion of democratic norms in Israel,” he says. “I’ve been concerned since before October 7 — and I’m more so now.”

This is not the critique of a distant observer. Cotler’s warnings come from someone who has spent decades investing in Israel’s democratic strength, legal integrity and international standing.

In fact, as Canada’s former justice minister and attorney general, Cotler’s own reforms were directly shaped by Israel’s legal system.

“When two Canadian Supreme Court justices resigned, the power to appoint their replacements was vested in me,” he says. “I looked to Israel and actually adopted their judicial appointments model and brought it to Canada.”

He also admired Israel’s separation of powers between the attorney general and justice minister, which in Canada is fused under one role.

Now he feels like he’s watching the principles that he revered being dismantled at their source.

‘I used to look to Israel for these values — and now I feel like they’re being eroded’

“I used to look to Israel for these values — and now I feel like they’re being eroded,” he says, expressing particular horror over the government’s ongoing attempts to remove Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara from office for obviously political reasons.

“To try to fire the Attorney General is unprecedented. Every living [Israeli] AG — regardless of party — opposes it. It only erodes respect for the rule of law,” Cotler says.

The same, he argues, applies to the prime minister’s attempt to remove Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service, in the middle of a war, and as Bar led an investigation into the so-called Qatargate scandal.

“[Bar] already accepted responsibility for October 7. He asked only to remain until the hostages are returned and the investigation is concluded. To try to fire him now is a clear conflict of interest,” Cotler says.

Cotler is not only a legal scholar, but one of Israel’s most consistent defenders on the world stage — and someone who has long believed that Israel’s democracy is its strongest defense against its enemies. The government’s ongoing attempts to change the judiciary, Cotler says, represent an existential danger.

“This entire process takes the country down a dangerous road to a constitutional crisis,” he says.

Cotler has long advocated for Israel to adopt a constitution, one partially modeled on Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. He worked closely with former cabinet minister Dan Meridor and others on early drafts, including one from the Jewish People Policy Institute that he still considers “very good.” But that effort stalled, and the current moment, he warns, shows the cost of that unfinished project.

For Cotler, the debate over the judicial overhaul is not about left versus right, but about those who uphold democratic principles and those who undermine them.

“Begin had deep respect for the judiciary, separation of powers, and for the Knesset as the wellspring of democracy,” he says of the founding leader of the right-wing Likud party — the same party now leading the assault on those very institutions.

“Even when he disagreed with rulings, he would say: ‘There are judges in Jerusalem.’ The idea that he would disrespect a judgment would have been unheard of,” Cotler says.

Cotler, a lifelong Liberal and center-left politician, says Begin’s approach transcended partisanship, let alone personal self-interest.

“When he chose Yitzhak Zamir as Attorney General — who later became one of Israel’s greatest jurists — Begin didn’t care that he wasn’t a Likudnik. Zamir was probably left of center, but Begin saw him as a great jurist, and that’s what mattered to him,” Cotler says.

As someone who has built bridges between Israel and the world, Cotler knows what is at stake when Israel undermines its own institutions.

“It’s rare in any democracy to have a political leader who puts principle above politics,” he says. “Begin, for me, was the embodiment of moral, inspirational leadership for a Jewish and democratic state — a man who lived and breathed respect for the core values of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”

Global consequences

The implications of Israel’s internal legal crisis are not merely domestic, Cotler says, but reverberate outward, weakening the country’s standing on the global stage.

Israel has long relied on the argument that, as a functioning democracy with an independent judiciary, it does not fall under the International Criminal Court’s prosecutorial mandate, which permits it to intervene only when a state is unwilling or unable to carry out genuine legal proceedings.

However, Cotler says that efforts to sideline the attorney general, override Supreme Court rulings and push forward the judicial overhaul — even after October 7 — have undermined Israel’s credibility as a state that holds itself to democratic and legal standards.

This came to a head in 2024, when Cotler learned that ICC prosecutor Karim Khan — an erstwhile friend and past guest of the Raoul Wallenberg Center — was preparing to issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders.

“I said, ‘Karim, you’ve said yourself that Israel has an independent judiciary. The ICC isn’t supposed to substitute its judgment for that of a country with functioning legal institutions. You’re breaching the principle of complementarity,’” Cotler says.

Khan countered that Israel had failed to cooperate with the investigation — another core tenet of ICC procedure.

Cotler responded with action, arranging a series of high-level meetings between the prosecutor and senior Israeli officials, including Netanyahu and then-defense minister Yoav Gallant, both of whom have had ICC warrants issued for their arrest.

The visit was scheduled for May, but, at the last moment, as Khan’s staff were reportedly en route to the airport, the trip was canceled, and Khan held a press conference announcing the warrants.

“I was very upset,” Cotler recalls. “He told me, ‘Irwin, nobody is above the law.’ I responded: ‘There’s also equality before the law.’”

In a reality in which the Jewish state is held to a double standard, Cotler warns that it cannot afford to undermine its most powerful defense: that it is a functioning democracy capable of upholding the rule of law and prosecuting wrongdoing internally. His warning comes out of deep concern from someone who has spent a lifetime defending Israel’s legitimacy abroad and drawing strength from its founding ideals.

Cotler points to Khan’s contrasting decision not to issue warrants against Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, citing cooperation with the Court: “He met with a dictator engaged in crimes against humanity and chose not to act. But he issued them against the leadership of a democracy that had agreed to cooperate.”

That, Cotler says, was their last conversation.

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