The train crash in Israel is moving at full speed, and no one is hinting that it will stop pressing the accelerator. This Thursday, the Executive of Benjamin Netanyahu approved the law that will shield him in the position of prime minister before the justice, while tens of thousands of Israelis heeded a new call for “national disruption”, which caused cuts in main roads
In Tel-Aviv or Haifa the police dispersed the masses with water cannons and carried out dozens of violent arrests.
Before the parliamentary shutdown of Pessah (the Jewish Passover), the central committee of the anti-government marches has called a week of national shutdown. “We are facing a week that will define the fate of the State of Israel. Millions of people will come out to cry out against the attempt to turn us into a dictatorship”, the statement said.
They will start this Saturday with the weekly rally in the heart of Tel-Aviv, and during the week they will promote mockery of ministers and other unspecified actions, which will mean “going up a step in the resistance”. The marches also spread abroad: Netanyahu was greeted yesterday with cries of “shame!” by hundreds of Israelis in London, where the prime minister met with his counterpart Rishi Sunak in Downing Street.
After approving the measure that will prevent the judiciary from temporarily disqualifying a prime minister, a leader can only be suspended from office if requested by three quarters of the council of ministers, and only for health complications.
The Supreme Court may soon find Netanyahu in a conflict of interest as he pushes for drastic reform of the judiciary while his three corruption trials continue.
The demonstrators, coming from the educational, scientific, army reservists or hi-tech sectors, consider that the next few days will be critical, since the Executive will advance the law that will grant the political power the control to select the judges of the Court supreme Together with the measures stipulating that the Knesset and the Government can ignore the judgments of the justice or rewrite invalid laws, the bulk of the “judicial reform” will thus be completed.
From the Likud they allege that the opposition and the press spread falsehoods to incite the masses, and they defend that their plan will put an end to “judicial activism”. The Israeli right and the ultra-Orthodox view the high court as a closed leftist elite, which for decades vetoed the inclusion of religious precepts in civil life or the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. “The law will not control the court, it will sway it. We will open the doors to ideologies that represent sectors that were excluded,” Netanyahu defended.
Although he showed understanding towards the concerns of the protestants, the prime minister continues to ignore the warnings about a potential civil conflict. Although calls for insubordination continue – two hundred more fighter pilots refuse to “serve in the dictatorship’s army” – and the rating agencies warn about the damage that the attack is already causing in the Israeli economy on the separation of powers, Netanyahu was convinced that the reform “will bring an appropriate balance between the different institutions of government”.
Shikma Bressler, renowned scientist from the Weizmann Institute, was arrested during Thursday’s marches. He considers that the civil war has already started and that the magnitude of what is happening in Israel is not understood from the outside. “We are facing a real State coup, and if we are not able to stop it now, in a few weeks there will be no more democracy. It will be a point of no return”, said the doctor. And he concluded: “Conditioned by his criminal causes, Bibi (Netanyahu) gave excessive power to extremists who seek to change the character of Israel.”
