[Fasces]

Jerusalem
CNN
—
Half a million Israelis took to the streets in the tenth consecutive week of protests against plans by the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to overhaul the country’s judicial system, organizers claimed.

Israel has a population of just over 9 million, so if organizers’ estimates are correct, about 5% of Israelis came out to voice their opposition to the proposed reforms.

Nearly half of the protesters – about 240,000 – gathered in Tel Aviv, the organizers said. In Jerusalem, several hundred demonstrators gathered in front of President Isaac Herzog’s house. They carried Israeli flags and chanted slogans including “Israel will not be a dictatorship.”

On Thursday, Herzog – whose role is largely ceremonial – urged the Netanyahu government to take the judicial overhaul legislation off the table.

Protesters and critics of Netanyahu’s plan say it would weaken the country’s courts and erode the judiciary’s ability to check the power of the country’s other branches of government.

The package of legislation would give Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, the power to overrule Supreme Court decisions with a simple majority. It would also give the government the power to nominate judges, which currently rests with a committee composed of judges, legal experts and politicians. It would remove power and independence from government ministries’ legal advisers, and take away the power of the courts to invalidate “unreasonable” government appointments, as the High Court did in January, forcing Netanyahu to fire Interior and Health Minister Aryeh Deri.

Critics accuse Netanyahu of pushing the legislation in order to get out of corruption trials he is currently facing. Netanyahu denies that, saying the trials are collapsing on their own, and that the changes are necessary after judicial overreach by unelected judges.

Israel does not have a written constitution, but a set of what are called Basic Laws.

“We are done being polite,” said Shikma Bressler, an Israeli protest leader. “If the laws being suggested will pass, Israel will no longer be a democracy.”

About two out of three (66%) Israelis believe the Supreme Court should have the power to strike down laws incompatible with Israel’s Basic Laws, and about the same proportion (63%) say they support the current system of nominating judges, according to a poll last month for the Israel Democracy Institute.

“The only thing this government cares about is crushing Israeli democracy,” opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid said.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/12/middleea ... index.html

[wat0n]

Bibi, while sucking up to the far-right, is trying to pull the usual playbook by which parliamentary republics end in dictatorships all to avoid going to jail. I really, really hope he fails but I do believe the Israeli left needs to provide an alternative that will keep the country's system of checks and balances working.

This kind of thing is one of the reasons I actually prefer presidential republics over parliamentary ones, at least in unitary republics like Israel.

[Beren]

Wow, Bibi's screwing Israel pretty hard.

Israel's elite fighter pilots escalate judicial reform protest

[Potemkin]

Wow, Bibi's screwing Israel pretty hard.

Israel's elite fighter pilots escalate judicial reform protest

It’s amazing what some people will do to avoid going to prison. Lol.

[Beren]

It’s amazing what some people will do to avoid going to prison. Lol.

It's even more amazing if what they can actually do. I mean it's amazing that Netanyahu could return to power, and it'd be super-amazing if he could finally make Israel his little fiefdom as Orbán made it with Hungary. However, Netanyahu never had a super-majority in the Knesset and Orbán never had to face 500,000 people protesting him nationwide, so Israel's apparently a lot more immune to that shit. But he can definitely screw Israel and even tear it apart perhaps, which is also quite amazing.

[Rich]

Its certainly amazing, the Liberals demand multiculturalism, multiculturalism, multiculturalism. And then they whine like bitches when they get it. Israel is top tier multiculturalism. Not only have you got Muslims who are far more divided from the Jews than say Russians and Ukrainians, but you've also got significant Druze and Christian Arab minorities. Then the majority ethnic, the Jews is far more divided on religious grounds than any western nation.

Netanyahu's not the problem, his corruption is the least of Israel's problems. He's a gifted politician, with very good temperaments and instincts to lead the right coalition in Israel. Israel should be proud of their great and superior electoral system, as opposed to the cretinous American system that gave them Trump and Biden.

Israel has a lot of madness, the Liberal with his authoritarian and fascistic instincts always looks to suppress and deny anything he doesn't like. The Israeli electoral system allows that madness to express itself out in the open, far better that, than everyone be forced into 2 political parties like the US.

[Beren]

Netanyahu's not the problem, his corruption is the least of Israel's problems. He's a gifted politician

Netanyahu being a "gifted" politician deepening and taking advantage of Israel's problems for his own and his party's benefit while fighting for his political survival and trying to avoid jail is definitely a problem, though. However, the real nature of the problem is this:

This is not just about the balance of power between the government and the judiciary. It is about a secular middle class recognizing that this may be its last chance to preserve what it has always seen as Israel’s essential character.

If the government pushing to reform the powers of the Supreme Court was not dominated by religious parties – Shas, United Torah Judaism, Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit – the protest would be much more limited and basically consist of Meretz and a few Labor voters. And the only news organization covering the protests would be Haaretz.

In this battle, the Supreme Court has become a symbol of much more than just the checks and balances in Israel’s democratic system. It has become a struggle for Israel itself.