The train wreck in Israel is going full steam ahead, and no one is hinting that it will let up on the accelerator. This Thursday, the Executive of Beniamin Netanyahu approved the law that will shield him in office from justice, while tens of thousands of Israelis responded to a new call for "national disruption", which caused cuts on main roads. In Tel Aviv or Haifa, the police dispersed the masses with water cannons and made dozens of violent arrests.
Before the parliamentary recess of Pesaj (the Jewish Passover), the central committee of the anti-government marches has called a week of national stoppage. “We are facing a week that will define the destiny of the State of Israel. Millions will come out to cry out against the attempt to turn us into a dictatorship,” the statement said.
They will begin this Saturday with the weekly concentration in the heart of Tel Aviv, and during the week they will promote escraches to ministers and other unspecified actions, which will mean "climbing 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 his counterpart Rishi Sunak in Downing Street.
After approving the measure that will prevent justice 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 could soon consider Netanyahu to be in a conflict of interest, since he is pushing for a drastic reform of the judiciary while his three corruption trials are still underway.
The protesters, 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 political power control to select the judges of the Supreme Court. Together with the measures that stipulate that the Knesset and the Government will be able to ignore the rulings of justice or rewrite invalidated 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 defend that their plan will put an end to "judicial activism". The Israeli right and the ultra-Orthodox see 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 balance it. We will open its doors to ideologies that represent sectors that were excluded," Netanyahu defended.
While showing sympathy for protesters' concerns, the prime minister continues to ignore warnings of potential civil conflict. While the calls for insubordination continue –200 more fighter pilots refuse to “serve in the army of the dictatorship”– and the rating agencies warn about the damage that the attack on the separation of powers is already causing to the Israeli economy, Netanyahu He was convinced that the reform "will provide an adequate balance between the different government institutions."
Shikma Bressler, a renowned Weizmann Institute scientist, was arrested during the marches on Thursday. She considers that the civil war has already begun, and that the magnitude of what is happening in Israel is not understood from the outside. “We are facing a real coup, and if we are not able to stop it now, in the next few weeks democracy will no longer exist. It will be a point of no return”, considered the doctor. And she concluded: "Conditioned by his criminal causes, Bibi (Netanyahu) gave excessive power to extremists who seek to change the character of Israel."
