The return of Benyamin Netanyahu to power is also the resumption of weekly demonstrations after Shabbat, on Saturday evening, in Israel. In 2020, the mobilization had lasted for months against the Prime Minister on trial for corruption; it has been reborn, even more massively, since the new far-right government was sworn in on December 29, 2022. An unofficial count counted some 80,000 demonstrators on Saturday January 14 – the previous week there were 30,000.
Most concentrate their grievances against the justice reform presented on January 4 by the Keeper of the Seals, Yariv Levin. The new coalition notably plans to weaken the supervisory power of the Supreme Court and to politicize the appointments of judges and legal advisers.
From Habima Square, in the heart of Tel Aviv, the procession overflowed into the surrounding streets, a tide of white and blue Israeli flags under the storm showers. Former Supreme Court magistrate Ayala Frocaccia, the first personality to speak, deplored the “beginning of a new era with a new definition of democracy: not a democracy based on values, but a truncated democracy which rests entirely on the ‘will of the voter’”.
Opposition leaders kept low profile – at organizers’ request, newspaper says Ha’aretz – the outgoing Prime Minister, Yaïr Lapid, was absent. Former Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who briefly formed a coalition with Netanyahu between 2020 and 2021, however quickly took the megaphone, promising to use “all legal means to avoid a coup”. Other, more limited demonstrations took place in Jerusalem and Haifa, a large city in the north of the country.
Fear of regime change
Saturday’s rally was the culmination of a week-long protest against justice reform that threatens to destabilize Israel’s institutional balance of power, including granting parliamentarians the right to change laws by absolute majority , without the Supreme Court being able to really oppose it. The president of the institution, Esther Hayut, severely condemned, Thursday, January 12, the government’s attempt to reduce justice to “a silent institution”.
” It’s about of an unbridled attack on the justice system, as if it represented an enemy that had to be fought and crushed”, scolded the magistrate at a conference in Haifa. Such an outing, on the part of the Chief Justice, is unprecedented in Israel. Several hundred lawyers demonstrated against the reform and a dozen former prosecutors published a letter of protest.
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