The protests have brought Israel’s largest cities to a standstill, disrupted Netanyahu’s overseas travel and even forced his wife to flee a Tel Aviv hair salon under heavy police protection. They also say that Netanyahu has a conflict of interest in trying to reshape the nation’s legal system at a time when he is on trial. Netanyahu’s conservative allies say the bill is needed to rein in a system of judges who are unelected and overly interventionist in political issues.īut his opponents say the overhaul is a power grab that would weaken a system of checks and balances and concentrate authority in the hands of the prime minister and his extremist allies. Among its key components are proposals that would allow the ruling coalition to control the appointment of judges and give it the authority to strike down Supreme Court rulings it dislikes. On Tuesday, Netanyahu’s coalition pushed through a law allowing hospitals to bar the entry of bread into their facilities during the Passover holiday, when religious Jews do not eat leavened foods.īut the government’s most controversial move so far has been the introduction of its judicial overhaul. Ultra-Orthodox partners, for instance, want to strengthen a system that grants them exemptions from compulsory military service in order to study religious texts. The nonstop crises have distracted Netanyahu from his traditional focus on security and diplomatic issues.ĭomestically, these partners have alienated large swaths of the Israeli public, primarily secular, middle-class taxpayers, with demands widely seen as religious coercion or infringing on the rights of LGBTQ people, Palestinian citizens and other minorities. These partners have antagonized the United States and other Western allies, as well as Israel’s new Arab allies in the Gulf, by aggressively pushing for West Bank settlement construction and making controversial statements about the Palestinians. When Netanyahu finally was able to secure a parliamentary majority after the most recent vote last November, he required the support of ultra-Orthodox and ultranationalist parties to form the country’s most right-wing government in history. Since he was indicted on corruption charges in 2019, a string of former partners and allies have abandoned him, plunging the country into five rounds of elections in under four years. Much of Netanyahu’s predicament is rooted in his own legal woes. While other protest groups said they would suspend their activities, they also said they were ready to spring back into action if necessary. “The government will not be able to pass the judicial coup because the millions of citizens who have protested until now, will not give up.” “The protesters who take to the streets are not stupid,” the grassroots protest movement said Tuesday. If anything, his opponents appear to have been emboldened by the success of their protests. “Rather it’s a cease-fire, perhaps for regrouping, reorganizing, reorienting and then potentially charging ahead.”Īs Netanyahu tries to regroup, those obstacles show no sign of disappearing. Plesner said that Netanyahu’s pause this week did not mark a “domestic peace accord” between Israelis. “He understood that he’s in a dead end,” said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank. While Netanyahu has the support in parliament to push through the plan, the prospect of continued unrest along with economic, diplomatic and security damage proved too much for him to handle.
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