Several tens of thousands of Israelis gathered on Saturday evening for the 27e consecutive week in central Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities to demonstrate against a controversial judicial reform championed by the government.
The demonstrators were more numerous than in recent weeks, according to the organizers who put forward the figure of 180,000 demonstrators in Tel Aviv.
The Israeli media also gave rising figures, (around 150,000 demonstrators), on the eve of the introduction Monday in the Knesset of an important provision of the reform.
The police do not provide estimates of the number of demonstrators of which a hundred were dispersed Saturday evening with water cannons after blocking the urban highway of Tel Aviv, according to an AFP journalist.
After unsuccessful attempts at negotiations with the opposition following the announcement at the end of March of a “pause” in attempts to legislate on reform, the government is relaunching the offensive in Parliament on Monday, with the examination in first reading of a bill aimed at canceling the possibility for the judiciary to rule on the “reasonableness” of government decisions.
This provision affects in particular the appointment of ministers. In January, it forced the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to dismiss the number two in the government, Arié Dery, convicted of tax evasion, following the intervention of the Supreme Court.
“We must act on what Netanyahu’s government is doing to our country and to the Israeli dream. If the Netanyahu government doesn’t stop, it will learn in the coming days what will happen when we get angry,” said historian and essayist Yuval Noah Harari at the opening of the Tel- Aviv.
A day of national mobilization was announced for Tuesday by the organizers.
For Amit Lev, 40 years old and an executive in the high-tech sector, “if we don’t stop what is happening now, there will be no going back.”
The bill which will be introduced on Monday “aims to prevent the judiciary from criticizing government decisions that do not fall under any other law”, he worries.
“If this law passes we will not be able to live as we wish,” said Nira, a 59-year-old physiotherapist, saying she was worried about the future.
Formed at the end of December with the support of far-right parties and ultra-Orthodox Jewish formations, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to pass a justice reform aimed at increasing the power of elected officials over that of magistrates.
The government believes the reform is necessary to ensure a better balance of power, but its critics see it as a threat to Israeli democracy and its institutional safeguards.
Demonstrations against the judicial reform project have followed one another without interruption every Saturday evening since January in what is considered one of the largest protest movements in the history of Israel.