Tens of thousands of Israelis walk to Jerusalem on a highway ahead of a key vote on judicial reform

On the eve of the Israeli Parliament, located in Jerusalem, to begin debating an important judicial reform law, a crowd arrived on foot this Saturday in the city along the Tel Aviv highway. The objective: to show that the protest movement against the government of Benjamin Netanyahu is facing a key vote very much alive, even after 30 consecutive weeks of demonstrations. The march ended with a massive demonstration in front of Parliament and others in different parts of the country totaling some 200,000 people. Meanwhile, the organization of military reservists opposed to the reform, Brothers in Arms, has announced that some 10,000 of them will be absent from training if the controversial text goes ahead.

The march began last Thursday in Tel Aviv, some 60 kilometers away, with hundreds of people, as a more symbolic than massive initiative, but it added thousands along the way. In its last section it became a tide of about 35,000 that crossed, under the sun and with national flags, the Santiago Calatrava bridge that leads to Jerusalem. The participants then gathered in front of Parliament. A part has camped in a nearby park, awaiting the vote, scheduled for Monday and which has shifted the focus of the protest from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Histadrut, the trade union center that everyone looks to for its ability to call a general strike, as it did last March, will hold an emergency meeting.

The text, which will reach the Knesset – the national Parliament – on Sunday, is one of the most important in the package that makes up the judicial reform presented in January by the Minister of Justice, Yariv Levin, and has divided Israel socially and politically. The proposal consists of stripping the Supreme Court of the power to annul those decisions of the Government, ministers or elected public officials -such as mayors- that it considers clearly unreasonable.

The Executive – a coalition of conservatives, ultra-nationalists and ultra-orthodox – considers that the court unfairly assumed this tool and grants it excessive power that it uses with political intentions. Its defenders see it, on the contrary, as a necessary legal counterweight in a country without a Constitution and denounce an attempt to remove the obstacles to the executive power similar to those experienced by Turkey, Poland or Hungary.

The Knesset approved the document in first reading last week. Then, its Constitution, Law and Justice Committee gave the green light to the final text after 19 hours of debate and a failed attempt to stop it with political filibustering: the opposition presented nearly 28,000 amendments, which ended up being voted on at dawn at 8:00 p.m.

In one of the demonstrations, in the city of Modiin, the leader of the opposition – former Prime Minister Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) – has assured that the Government has to choose in the coming days between “destroying itself” or “destroying the army, the economy and relations with the United States”. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently assured that he had never seen Netanyahu so “determined” to pass the norm.

The train crash dynamics have once again mobilized critics of judicial reform. In recent weeks, they have resumed actions such as blocking the country’s main airport (Tel Aviv), highways and train stations, in parallel to the massive demonstrations on Saturdays, which have continued to gather tens of thousands of people, especially in Tel Aviv.

pressures

The panorama is similar to that of March, when Netanyahu was forced to temporarily paralyze the reform due to a combination of pressures: massive demonstrations, the public distancing of his Defense Minister, Yoav Galant; the criticisms of the president of the United States, Joe Biden; the leaking of the crisis to the economy and the Armed Forces… The government and the opposition then began a dialogue, sponsored by the president, Isaac Herzog, which hardly generated any progress, amid mistrust and mutual reproaches. Last month, a contentious parliamentary session capped off the negotiations. The president stressed Tuesday, before meeting at the White House with Biden, that the reform crisis demonstrates that Israel has a “solid and resilient” democracy, despite “painful situations, heated debates and challenging moments.”

As in March, the army reservists – a sacrosanct institution in the country – are raising the pulse, which reached its zenith this Saturday, with the announcement that some 10,000 reservists from different corps and units will refuse to put on their uniform if the deputies convert the proposal into law. The day before, more than 1,100 of the Air Force told the chiefs of the General Staff, Herzi Halevi, and of military aviation, Tomer Bar. The announcement has more impact than other similar ones because it is a prestigious body, key to the country’s military superiority and essential for a possible surprise attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, with which Israel has been threatening for years.

Also as then, the Defense Minister is divided between his belonging to the Executive (Netanyahu kept him in office after announcing his dismissal) and his greater knowledge of what is going on in the Army. For this reason, on Friday there was a leak to the local media that he had asked for the vote to be delayed. His office confirmed that Galant “is taking steps to reach a broad consensus and ensure the security of the State of Israel, leaving the Defense Forces out of political discourse.” Netanyahu gave a speech to the nation on Thursday in which he made no announcements, but did warn that “in a democracy, the Army is subordinate to the Government, it does not subordinate it” and described as “illegitimate” the “attempt by military elements” to “dictate government policies through threats.”

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