Netanyahu's Coalition Government Hangs in Balance Over Judicial Overhaul: Reports
Israel has seen massive protests and there are questions if the country could be headed towards a civil war.
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A top leader from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government warned him against softening the judicial overhaul plans that have pushed the country to the brink.
Yariv Levin, the justice minister, told Netanyahu that he would resign from his post and work to bring down the hardline coalition if he “soften elements of the sweeping reforms in light of intense public pushback,” The Times of Israel reported, citing Israel’s Channel 12.
Both Netanyahu and Levin have denied the report, but the news station said it stands by its reporting.
“Yariv Levin is pushing this to the extreme for political reasons. There is no doubt he will be the chief beneficiary if the attorney general orders Netanyahu’s recusal. Netanyahu has lost trust and is trying to lead the reform himself, but the attorney general is preventing it,” one source told the station.
This week’s Trends Journal reported on how 70,000 protesters held a rally outside Jerusalem’s Knesset on Monday to voice outrage over Netanyahu’s government’s effort to erase the country’s system of checks and balances by overhauling the judicial system.
Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, urged calm and called on Netanyahu to hold off on the move and said, “This powder keg is about to explode.”
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Critics have called out Netanyahu’s hardline government for proposing an “unbridled attack on the justice system” and said the proposal would give the government a “blank check” to pass laws. Those taking part in the protests have said the fight they are in is a fight for the soul of Israel’s longstanding commitment to a democratic society.
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Netanyahu has called the reforms sensible and actually help preserve democracy from a judiciary that wants to make its own laws instead of enforce them. Netanyahu has accused opposition leaders of “dragging the country into anarchy.”
“I call on the leaders of the opposition: stop it. Stop deliberately leading the country into anarchy. Get a hold of yourselves, show responsibility and leadership,” he said. “Most Israeli citizens do not want anarchy. They want a substantive discussion and in the end they want unity.”
Last month, bank CEOs in the country met with Netanyahu inside the Likud party’s headquarters in Tel Aviv and warned him that they’ve noticed an outflow from savings accounts, which they said is tied to his move to weaken the country’s courts.
“Maybe we are wrong and you’re right, but the price of a mistake could be a fatal blow to democracy and the economy,” Uri Levin, the head of Discount Bank, said, according to The Times of Israel.
Amir Fuchs, a senior researcher at the Israel Democracy Institute, a think-tank in Jerusalem, told the paper.
“We’ve never seen a wave of legislation like this,” he said. He called the proposed changes a critical blow to democracy.”
Thomas Friedman, The New York Times columnist, wrote today that “Israeli investors are looking at Israel today and asking this simple question: If the Israeli legal system that has gradually and collaboratively evolved over the past 75 years was so awful — so in need of emergency radical surgery overnight, without any national debate — how did it help produce and guard the Israeli economic miracle of the past 20 years that Netanyahu always, and justifiably, takes credit for and has made Israel’s middle class amazingly prosperous?
Nothing is more dangerous to Israel’s continued prosperity than Netanyahu’s inability today to give a credible answer to that simple question.”
TRENDPOST: A YouTube video emerged earlier this month that showed Rabbi Sharon Brous giving a speech about the dangers of the judicial overhaul. A senior rabbi of IKAR, a Jewish congregation in Los Angeles, she warned that the Jewish State could be ready for a revolution and that nobody should be surprised by the lurch to illiberalism and ultranationalism.
Brous tied Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as an example of how public sentiment provided Netanyahu’s government with momentum. She said there is a pervasive feeling among many Israelis that Palestine is an “Us vs. Them” issue, with Israelis fighting for all that is good and Palestinians as unvirtuous.
“This is not an accident,” she said. “And this is not an anomaly. This moment of illiberalism has been a long time in the making and our silence has been complicity.”