After months of massive protests in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week paused his judicial reform project, although he had to make concessions to the most conservative sectors of the ruling alliance, which threatened to dissolve it if it caved in to the protesters. and which in turn generated new demands from civil society.
Netanyahu assured that he paused the parliamentary process of voting on his controversial reform to “prevent a civil war through dialogue”.
The aforementioned reform was going to incline the appointments of judges almost completely as an attribute of the government in power, at the same time that it would allow legislators to annul decisions of the highest court with a mere simple majority.
The government leader’s decision was not without concessions to the most conservative sectors of the alliance that placed him as prime minister, since figures such as the head of the National Security portfolio, the far-right Itamar Ben Gvir, threatened to resign if they lowered the reform.
After declining his position to resign, Ben Gvir announced in a statement on Wednesday something that had been denied to him at the time of forming the government: the creation of a National Guard whose objective will be to “combat terrorism, nationalist crimes and restore governability.” In Israel.
So, the leader of the Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party would be in charge of a force of 2,000 soldiers who would report directly to him.
The creation of this force, which must be approved tomorrow by the Council of Ministers, in turn led hundreds of people to take to the streets again to protest throughout the country.
“If this is approved, it is an extremely heavy political influence. And it’s not that the other forces don’t have it, but this is another level of danger because we are giving a private militia to a minister, a force that is separate from the other forces. security,” the advocacy director of the Breaking the Silence (BtS) organization of former Israeli soldiers told Télam, Or Givati.
In addition, the former member of the Security Forces (IFD for its acronym in English), who worked in Palestinian territories occupied by Israel and critic of the occupation, characterized the minister as “a settler from Hebron”.
“We’ve known him in BtS since we started. He’s been documented engaging in attacks or inciting violence against Palestinians, against civil society. He’s a settler leader and we all know about settler violence. We saw him on ( the West Bank city of) Huwara, where they burned the whole town and Ben Gvir supported them,” he said.
“This guy is the one they are giving him the private militia. Netanyahu is giving too much power to a person who openly supports violence and that is very dangerous.Givati added.
Ben Gvir had already suggested on different occasions the possibility that the Border Police, in charge of security in the colonies and in constant tension with the Palestinians, join the new national guard.
Both the Palestinian government, with headquarters in the West Bank, and the leaders of Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, rejected the announcement, considering that it could affect Palestinian territory.
This and other aspects, such as budgetary issues and the chain of command of the new force, must begin to be defined by the cabinet from this Sunday’s meeting.
Even when there is uncertainty about the scope of its operations, For Givati, Netanyahu’s concession “sends a very clear message to the settler movement, to the soldiers in the West Bank and to the Palestinians” which is about the “legitimacy and authority of Ben Gvir”, beyond the fact that he was already in charge of a ministry .
“This will affect the legitimacy that settlers and soldiers in the West Bank have for violence against Palestinians,” he said.
This occurs while for the first time in the country “a coalition formed solely and exclusively by extreme right parties” governs, the professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and activist told Télam. Claudia Kedar.
Within the coalition, the doctor in history characterized Netanyahu’s party, the Likud, which is also the largest in the government, as “historically liberal right-wing, but which is taking the far-right and non-liberal path”, while “Religious Zionism, of the extreme right, broke a record in the last election and has 14 seats, when they have never had anything like this.”
Another demand that the settler leaders of the coalition had given up to reach the government and that less than two months after its formation they managed to obtain was the transfer of administrative functions over occupied territories in the West Bank, which were transferred to the Minister of Finance, the settler of the Religious Zionism party Bezalel Smotrich and that they were taken from the head of the Defense portfolio, Yoav Gallant.
Gallant, who is also a deputy from Netanyahu’s Likud party, was removed by the prime minister for speaking out against the reform. However, the announcement was not formalized and he remains in office.
According to Kedar, who has participated in the demonstrations against Netanyahu’s judicial reform, “Their main promise was that they were going to rebuild personal security, that there were going to be no more acts of terror. They played on people’s fears.”
And to this we must add that “in the opposition there is almost no left, because the left has been shrinking and weakening. There is almost no counterweight,” the researcher considered.
In any case, he stressed that the government alliance has 64 of the 120 seats in the Knesset (parliament), which indicates that “society is very divided and it is not that the majority of the population is of the extreme right or right.”
For this reason, the Likud-led administration faced an “unprecedented” process of protests, Kedar said, highlighting the “diversity” of the demonstrations: people who even define themselves as “right-wing” attend while “they are start to see more religious people” or businessmen linked to “startups” or high-tech companies, he explained.
“Never in the history of Israel have there been so many people protesting. Israelis do not have that culture of going out and protesting. We see that the quantity and intensity -because it has already been 13 weeks- are growing,” he said.
“I don’t see any possibility that this movement will disappear, unless there is a total repression or they are banned. The population understands that it is not a reform, but that they are trying to change the system of government unilaterally. We are talking the end of Israeli democracy,” he said.
Besides, warned that the demonstrations are becoming quite violent and that, despite their massiveness, the Arab population living in Israel has not joined, because “they do not feel part of it and perhaps because they believe that it will give the government an excuse to delegitimize protest”.