The political and social pulse around judicial reform is once again heating up in Israel. With the dialogue paralyzed, more and more decibels in the statements of the government and opposition and, above all, the resumption of the legislative offensive in Parliament, tens of thousands of Israelis have once again mobilized against the initiative, which they consider a threat to their democracy. The political and social movement against the reform already showed its teeth last week with a massive protest at the Tel Aviv airport and has upped the ante this Tuesday with a Day of Disruption. It has consisted of dozens of actions, from early in the morning to the usual demonstration in Tel Aviv, in which the number of attendees has mattered less than how much they have been noticed. There have been more than 70 arrests for disturbance of public order, according to a police statement published in the middle of the afternoon.
Protesters have managed to block roads and have gathered again at the airport, which centralizes almost all of the country’s international air traffic. They have also concentrated on Kaplan Street, the epicenter of the Saturday protests, and on the branch of the United States Embassy, both in Tel Aviv; in front of the presidential residence in Jerusalem and at the Haifa District Court. Police have used water cannons to disperse some protests.
The Histadrut, the main union center, has threatened a second general strike, like the one it called in March and forced Netanyahu to temporarily halt the reform. “Where are you taking the State of Israel? What legacy do you want to leave? Put an end to this crazy chaos, ”Netanyahu’s head, Arnon Bar-David, urged Netanyahu at a press conference in Tel Aviv. “When the situation reaches an extreme and all other paths have been followed, we will step in and use our force,” he added.
The internal debate on the reform has gone sour in recent weeks. Not only in the music, but also in the lyrics. The most radical wing of the Government has been calling for a “strong hand” in the face of roadblocks, rallies and escraches in front of the homes of ministers.
Last week, in fact, the head of the Tel Aviv Police, Amijai Eshed, resigned due to pressure from the Minister of National Security, the far-right Itamar Ben Gvir, to manage the protests more forcefully. “He could easily have used unreasonable force and filled the emergency room with [el hospital] Ichilov at the end of every demonstration in Tel Aviv. we could have evicted [la carretera] Ayalón in minutes, at the horrible price of breaking heads and bones, and destroying the contract that exists between the police and the citizens of Israel. I am paying an unbearable personal price for my decision to prevent a civil war, ”he said when announcing his departure.
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A few days later, in the 27th consecutive Saturday of demonstrations, the attendance at the concentration in Tel Aviv (some 150,000 people) already exceeded the average of the last three months, in which a relative truce was in force because the government and the opposition were still in dialogue under the auspices of the president, Isaac Herzog.
In this context, last Sunday, the different ministers aired their accumulated grievances against the government’s legal adviser and Netanyahu’s beast noire, Gali Baharav-Miara, and the police chief, Kobi Shabtai, in a meeting that the daily Yediot Aharonot He described it as a mixture of “ambush, witch hunt and verbal lynching.” The head of Transport, Miri Regev, called for the dismissal of Baharav-Miara for operating ideologically and “allowing anarchy to be created”, while Netanyahu considered it “unthinkable” that the security forces are acting only “against one party”. The police chief was forced to clarify that the only officers injured in the protests have been slightly. None, he specified, has ended up in the hospital in half a year of demonstrations.
legal filter
Right now the focus is on a clause called reasonableness. In a country without a Constitution or, therefore, a Constitutional Court, it serves as a legal filter, allowing the Supreme Court to annul those decisions of the Government, ministers or elected public officials -such as mayors- that it considers clearly unreasonable.
The suppression of the tool, one of the key points of the reform, was approved at first reading on Monday night. The 64 deputies of the coalition that makes up Netanyahu’s party (Likud) with ultra-Orthodox and ultra-nationalists, the most right-wing in the country’s 75-year history, voted in favor in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. The rest of the Chamber (56 seats) ruled against it.
The text needs another two readings (usually on the same day) to become law. The Minister of Justice, Yariv Levin, has already announced his intention for the Knesset to vote on them in the current parliamentary session, which ends at the end of the month, and with minimal variations.
“The law is balanced, responsible, significantly different from what perhaps should have been legislated. The basis of reasonableness is something with which the State of Israel survived many years without its existence. And believe it or not, the sun continued to rise every morning, even in those dark times”, ironized this Tuesday, at the beginning of the session of the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee of the Knesset, its president, Simja Rothman, one of the main battering rams of the reform.
President Herzog insisted last Sunday that an agreement is still “achievable”, precisely on reasonableness, and urged politicians from across the political spectrum to “put egos aside”. “Right now, no one is willing to sit down and talk without preconditions. It is a mistake of historic proportions,” he noted.
Eliminating the reasonableness clause would not only end a counterbalance to the executive branch. It would also open the door for Arye Deri, the leader of one of the coalition parties, the ultra-orthodox Sephardic Shas, to retake the Interior and Health portfolios that the Supreme Court took from him last January. The court resorted to this tool, considering it unreasonable both for Netanyahu to name a person convicted of a tax crime and the express legal amendment that allowed the appointment after the electoral victory last November. It consisted of limiting the prohibition of assuming a portfolio to anyone who had gone to prison, knowing that Deri had escaped by an out-of-court agreement.
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