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Israel’s parliament has voted through the first part of a controversial judicial overhaul pushed by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline government, capping a tumultuous seven-month battle over the changes.
The fight over the judiciary has tipped Israel into its worst political crisis in years, igniting 29 straight weeks of protests, opening up dangerous cracks in the country’s military and drawing expressions of concern from the US.
As thousands of protesters waving Israeli flags and blowing horns gathered outside parliament, MPs voted 64-0 to back legislation to limit the power of Israel’s top court, with the entire opposition boycotting the vote after a stormy 30-hour debate.
Yariv Levin, the hawkish justice minister who was a key architect of the overhaul, hailed the vote as the “first step in a historic process to correct the judicial system”.
But opposition leaders lambasted it as a bleak day for Israel’s democracy. “This is a complete breaking of the rules of the game,” said Yair Lapid, leader of the largest opposition party, Yesh Atid.
The bill, which will prevent Israel’s top court from using the standard of “reasonableness” to strike down government decisions, is part of a broader effort to rein in the judiciary that Netanyahu’s coalition with far-right and ultrareligious parties has been prioritising since taking power in December.
Government officials say the bill and other proposed changes — such as giving the coalition greater control over the body that appoints judges — are needed to clip the wings of an overly activist judiciary that they believe has long pushed a partisan, leftwing agenda.
But critics see the bill passed on Monday as the thin end of a wedge that will ultimately lead to checks on Israeli governments being eviscerated, pave the way for the undermining of minority rights and foster corruption.
Many liberal and secular Israelis also fear that the changes will allow Netanyahu’s far-right allies to impose their vision of a more religious, conservative society on the rest of the population.
Within minutes of the bill passing, an NGO had said that it would take an appeal against it to Israel’s top court. The Israeli Medical Association called a 24-hour strike for Tuesday, while the country’s largest trade union, Histadrut, warned it would take action if the government advanced any more judicial changes without reaching consensus with opponents.
“From this moment on any unilateral advancement of the reform will have grave consequences,” said its leader Arnon Bar-David.
In a sign of the unease that the turmoil has sparked among Israel’s allies, US president Joe Biden issued a last-ditch call on Sunday for Netanyahu’s government not to push through any changes unilaterally.
“From the perspective of Israel’s friends in the US, it looks like the current judicial reform proposal is becoming more divisive, not less,” Biden told the Axios website.
The White House put out another statement after the bill had passed, saying it was “unfortunate that the vote today took place with the slimmest possible majority”.
In a statement on Monday evening, Netanyahu said the government was prepared to resume negotiations with the opposition over the overhaul, and that he thought it would be possible to reach a “general agreement” by November. Lapid swiftly dismissed the offer as “empty”.
The battle over the changes has sparked one of the most sustained waves of protests in Israel’s modern history, with hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets week after week to demonstrate against the plans. Renewed protests swept across the country on Monday evening, with police using water cannons to disperse protesters in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
The protests have been accompanied by an unprecedented wave of resistance from reservists in Israel’s armed forces, with a group of 10,000 saying on Saturday that they would stop volunteering for service, echoing a similar announcement by 1,100 air force reservists a day earlier.
The threats have sparked alarm at the top of Israel’s military, with chief of staff Herzi Halevi warning on Sunday that the “cracks” in the military had become “dangerous”.
“If we don’t have a strong and united defence force . . . we will no longer be able to exist as a country in the region.”
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