Thousands of demonstrators staged a new “Day of Resistance” in opposition to the judicial reform promoted by Benjamin Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing government.
The street protests, which blocked several roads and spread throughout the country’s nerve centres, were backed by the Doctors’ Association, which announced a warning strike and the threat of an increasing number of Air Force reservists – an important element in a militarised country like Israel – to refrain from serving.
Expressions of rejection from various sectors of society include calls for civil disobedience.
The government wants, through a law that could be passed as soon as this week, to curtail the power of the Supreme Court of Justice, which is seen as a manoeuvre to weaken the democratic balance and lead to an autocratic executive power.
In support of the protest, Tel Aviv-Yaffo Mayor Ron Huldai today symbolically declared an intersection in the city where the protest has been going on for seven months as Democracy Square.
On the Ayalon highway in Tel Aviv, police violently dispersed the protesters, whom the national security minister and leader of Israel’s far-right Otsma Yehudit party, Itamar Ben Gvir, even branded “terrorists”. The minister, currently a member of the Knesset (Israeli parliament), is known for his racist stances, having on several occasions called for the expulsion of Arab citizens who are “not loyal to Israel”.
According to local reports 45 people were arrested, while a march has begun from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, due to arrive in the country’s capital in four days.
One of the leaders of the protest, Shikma Bressler, a physics doctor at the Weizmann Institute, called on her twitter account to march: “Tomorrow we leave at 6:00 am from Ariel Sharon Park. Those who can, now is the time to join in on foot or by car. You are invited to join the walkers. ”
The proposed law, discussed Tuesday in parliament’s committee aims to abolish the “reasonableness criterion”, a legal tool in which “the court must ask itself if a reasonable government, or a reasonable minister would decide in the way the government decided”.
With respect to this test, the court may rule that the administrative matters before it are grossly unreasonable and order the public authority to conform its administrative actions to reason.
While “reasonableness” can obviously be very fickle, the principle is seen as a way of limiting the all-powerful powers of the government of the day.
Hopefully, the same criteria, beyond the call for greater democracy, will also be demanded and applied to Israel’s discriminatory, violent and outrageous treatment of the Palestinian people, which certainly exceeds all reasonableness and compassion for the other.