Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will meet Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Friday in Rome, while the tenth consecutive week of protests over his government’s proposed judicial reform are underway in Tel Aviv and other cities across the country. According to the demonstrators and the opposition, Netanyahu’s projects risk weakening Israeli democracy – if not even compromising it – and the protests are unprecedented in terms of involvement, strength and duration: it is the largest protest movement in the history of Israel.
The demonstrations have involved various cities in recent months, have brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets and at the moment do not seem to decrease in intensity. The protest also involved sectors of the population that were very distant from each other: in addition to the more usual anti-occupation of the Palestinian territories, environmentalist, feminist and LGBTQ+ rights movements, sectors that in the past had rarely taken a clear political position or participated at demonstrations. Workers from high-tech companies (a rapidly growing sector in the country) demonstrated on Thursday, while in recent days it was the turn of economists, doctors and even the military to express their disagreement with the policies of the Netanyahu government, formed in the last days of 2022 with the most right-wing coalition in Israel’s history.
Le proteste a Tel Aviv (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
Particularly significant was the adhesion to the protests of some army reservists, including 37 fighter pilots who abstained from the air force training scheduled for Wednesday. Reservists are an important part of the Israeli army: they are often called up for military service, even for two months a year, even in peacetime. The joining of the protest by the military, normally far from political disputes and mostly pro-government, was considered unprecedented; the same applies to employees without responsibility for the Mossad, Israel’s secret servicewho have been authorized by the agency to join the demonstrations.
The protesters’ claims are many, but the theme that has led to the most massive mobilization is the reform of the balance between state powers. The most disputed law concerns the Supreme Court, which plays an exceptionally important role in the country’s political life: Israel does not have a constitution (although it has a number of Fundamental laws which enshrine individual rights and citizen-state relations) and has relatively few counterweights to the power of the incumbent government. Until now it has been the Supreme Court that has performed this role, with the possibility of abolishing any law approved by the Knesset, i.e. the Israeli parliament, on the basis of the so-called “reasonableness clause”: if the judges of the Supreme Court believe that an administrative measure is in somehow “unreasonable”, they can abolish it without the parliament being able to do anything to intervene.
The procession in Tel Aviv (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
The reform, promoted by the Netanyahu government a few days after taking office, provides that Parliament with a simple majority vote can annul the sentence of the Supreme Court, shifting the final control to the political forces of the government. The new law also provides for a change in the method of appointing the Court, effectively entrusting it to the political power. The government justifies the reform with the desire to reduce the excessive power of unelected judges, but according to many critics the new arrangement would leave almost absolute powers to the government coalition and its prime minister, so much so as to question the very definition of Israel as a full democracy.
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Other laws currently under discussion in parliament provide that convictions for corruption are not a decisive obstacle to the assumption of ministerial offices and that the powers of the prime minister cannot be suspended except for health reasons. According to critics, these reforms are even more specifically designed to safeguard the future of Netanyahu, who is implicated in more than one corruption trial.
The mobilization in Israel has been massive: demonstrators have repeatedly blocked important roads in major cities and in recent days the police have responded with stun grenades and water cannons to disperse the crowds. On Thursday, protesters blocked access to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport for a few hours, where a meeting between Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was scheduled; then they were dispersed by the forces of order without particular clashes (which instead had taken place over the weekend) and making 22 arrests. The prime minister therefore had to reach the airport by helicopter, and from there he left for Rome.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yariv Levin at left (Gil Cohen-Magen/Pool via AP)
Netanyahu’s official trip to Italy itself was complicated by protests: over 150 pilots of the El Al airline refused to take service to participate in the trip, while in Italy the interpreter Olga Dalia Padoa, a literary translator from Hebrew, she refused to accompany Netanyahu to the main temple in Rome as proposed by the Israeli embassy in Italy. In a Facebook post he explained his choice as follows: «I do not share Netanyahu’s political ideas and I consider them highly dangerous with regard to the well-being and safeguarding of democracy in the state of Israel. (…) You don’t collaborate with those who promote fascist and liberticidal principles, you just don’t do it».
Also on Thursday, other protesters, including a large group of reservists, blocked access to the Jerusalem offices of the Kohelet Forum, a right-wing and conservative think tank that has backed the reform. The various protest actions also involved the port of Haifa, blocked by a large fleet of small boats (even simple kayaks) of the organization “Sailors to save democracy”.
The strength of the protests and the possible weakening of democracy in Israel – already questioned for some time due to the treatment of Palestinians – have also been the subject of debate in the US Jewish communitywhich normally does not take clear-cut positions on the country’s internal politics: the Jewish Federation of North America has sent an open letter to the majority and opposition political forces expressing its opposition to the reform and asking for the intervention of Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
It is not yet clear when the disputed reforms will be discussed and voted on in the plenary, but the times could also be very short: if no second thoughts or compromises are made, they could pass within the next ten to fifteen days. According to Dahlia Scheindlincolumnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz and collaborator of the British Guardian«Israel faces a crossroads: either the democratic forces and the moderate right join forces with the opposition, saving the country’s institutions and its international position, or the government will complete its shift towards the forms of power of the famous friends of Netanyahu, the Hungarian Viktor Orban and the new authoritarian allies in the Middle East».