The wife of Israeli Prime Minister Sara Netanyahu was blocked by protesters on Wednesday night 1er March, in a hair salon in Tel Aviv. This “seat” or “Marie Antoinette Moment”as Noa Landau, one of the editors-in-chief of the left-wing daily, humorously calls her Ha’aretz, lasted more than an hour and a half. An impressive column of police ended up breaking the ranks of the demonstrators. They cleared a passage for the motorcade of Mme Netanyahu, escorted at a gallop by police on horseback.
Three hours earlier, Benyamin Netanyahu had launched an address of unprecedented darkness on television. He was erecting a ” Red line “ against “violence and anarchy” whom he sees settling in Israel. A massive social movement has been denouncing for two months his justice reform project, which aims to free the executive from any independent judicial supervision.
Mr Netanyahu compared the protesters to Israeli settlers who carried out a punitive expedition with impunity on Sunday against the Palestinian village of Huwara, in the West Bank, after the murder of two of them. He framed the debate over his reform as a culture war that pits one part of Israel against another – opinion polls indicate that a clear majority fears it.
He spoke of the trauma that the evacuation of the settlements from Gaza, decreed by Ariel Sharon in 2005, was for the right. cannot happen again, a fight that culminates in the reform of justice. The Prime Minister forgot to specify that the resistance to the evacuation of Gaza was marked by massacres perpetrated against Palestinians in Shilo and Shefa Amr (eight dead).
This speech and this day mark a turning point. For the first time, the link is made between the reform of justice and the violence exerted by the army and the settlers in the territories. In Tel Aviv, demonstrators shouted to the police on Wednesday: “Where were you in Huwara?” »
“Incitement to Violence”
During the day, the minister responsible for settlements in the ministry of defence, Bezalel Smotrich, had appeared to call on the army to carry out ethnic cleansing there, affirming that“Huwara needs to be shaved. The State of Israel is the one who must raze it and not, God forbid, isolated individuals. » The US administration, which could host Mr. Smotrich in Washington in March, denounced a declaration “irresponsible, repulsive and sickening”. She asks Mr. Netanyahu to disavow this “incitement to violence”.
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