Nationwide uproar shook Israel on Tuesday after the government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu moved ahead with its judicial reform.
Protestors have taken to the streets, medical practitioners have declared a strike, and a rising number of army reservists plan to refuse to report for duty across Israel in response to an overhaul of the country’s judicial system.
While Netanyahu and his supporters have called the changes necessary in order to prevent judicial overreach, his critics have said that it will undermine the independence of the national courts.
“This is the destruction of Israeli democracy,” asserted opposition leader Yair Lapid, according to the Associated Press.
As reported in The Dallas Express, the long embroiled attempt of Netanyahu and his Likud party to curb the judiciary’s influence was given a critical boost on July 24. The country’s parliament passed a law that limits the Israeli supreme court’s ability to overturn decisions made by lawmakers.
This is the first step in what Netanyahu and his supporters hope to be a wide-sweeping change to how the judiciary operates.
Protests against the law change prompted Netanyahu to suspend the initiative in April, as covered in The Dallas Express. He had promised to open the matter up for more dialogue in order to reach a broader consensus after protests and a general strike brought the country and its embassies abroad to a standstill.
Yet public outrage has now reached its pinnacle, with thousands of protestors taking to the streets — some clashing with police, the Israel Medical Association calling for a 24-hour strike, and increasingly more military reservists pledging to refuse service, according to Reuters.
This time Netanyahu has pushed back.
At the request of the government, doctors were ordered not to strike by the Tel Aviv Regional Labour Court, according to Reuters.
“Tomorrow the physicians will go back to work, but I can say that thousands of them are not going to be silent,” explained Hagai Levine, chairman of the Israeli Association of Public Health Physicians, according to Reuters.
“[We] cannot work as physicians when Israel is no more a democratic state,” Levine added.
Moreover, Israel’s military is now taking disciplinary action against reservists refusing to serve. This has reportedly entailed a fine of 1,000 shekels ($270) and a 15-day jail sentence thus far, according to Reuters.
Noting an uptick “in requests to halt reserve duty,” Brigadier General Daniel Hagari told Israeli reporters that the situation has hindered the military’s readiness, according to Reuters.
This presents a potential national security risk considering that violent episodes between the Israeli armed forces and Iran-backed Palestinian militant groups have become more frequent and severe in the past months, as previously covered in The Dallas Express.
Lapid has urged protestors to wait for the country’s supreme court to rule on the appeals filed against the new law by entities like the Israel Bar Association, according to Reuters.
