Tel Aviv: Israel has appointed its first Muslim judge, justice Khaled Kabub to a permanent seat in its Supreme Court.
The four new justices appointed to the 15-member court are Judge Ruth Ronnen, Judge Khaled Kabub, Judge Gila Kanfi-Steinitz and attorney Yechiel Kasher.
63-year-old, Khaled Kabub was a former Tel Aviv District Court judge, and will be the Supreme Court’s first permanent Muslim justice. All previous Arab Israeli justices have been Christians.
In September 1997, Kabub was appointed as a judge to the Netanya Magistrate’s Court. In June 2003, he was appointed a judge of the Tel Aviv District Court, and in September 2017 was appointed as vice-president.
He was born in Jaffa and studied history and Islam at Tel Aviv University. He completed his law studies, then worked in a private practice before becoming a judge.
He was selected according to three criterions: excellence, balance and diversity. Kabub has spent most of his career dealing with economic crime cases and has lesser known constitutional opinions.
He is replacing Judge George Kara to take the “Arab-Israeli seat” on the court and is expected to be somewhere in the moderate activist spectrum.
The only other Muslim to have held the position of the Supreme Court was Abd al-Rahman al-Zobi, who was sentenced to one year in prison in 1999.
The new appointments were approved after several months of delay when the Israel Bar Association had agreed on three of four candidates.
