In February 2021, the Israel Award committee
for Mathematics and Computer Science decided to recommend
bestowing the award on Oded Goldreich (OG).
The Minister of Education asked the committee
to reconsider its decision due OG's political activity,
and after the committee reconfirmed its decision, making it final,
the minister refused to accept it.
The committee appealed to the Supreme Court (on March 30),
which, in a controversial decision (given on April 8),
allowed the minister to reconsider the issue,
and respond by 8-May-2021.
On June 20, after several postponements,
the minister published a final negative decision,
but on July 22 the government legal adviser notified the
court that - in his opinion - the minister's decision is
unreasonable and unjustified from a legal point of view.
On Aug 12, the court unanimously accepted the latter opinion,
and asked the (new) minister to take a new decision
based on the principles outlined in its ruling.
On Nov 18, the new education minister decided negatively,
causing the award committee to appeal to the Supreme Court again
(on 24-Nov-21). The hearing took place on 24-Feb-22,
and the verdict was published on 29-Mar-22.
The bottom-line was that the court instructed the minister
to approve the committee's recommendation.
On 11-Apr-22, the award was presented to OG.
See OG's report [in Hebrew]
of the entire affair,
main documentation,
some published opinions,
and news reports.
NOTE: The archive contains only documents and articles (published between 10-Mar-21 and 13-Apr-22) that I found useful for myself. In particular, I only followed publications in Haaretz and read some other articles that were referred to me by friends. In addition, I vividly recall deciding not to include two hostile opinions by legal scholars, since one was avoiding the facts and the other was avoiding the law. Of course, there were many more hostile opinions, mostly published at other news outlets, raising arguments that I addressed in Section 3.3 of my report and in my additional comments.