Israeli MPs vote through judicial reforms despite protests

Israel’s parliament has voted to advance a bitterly contested judicial overhaul that has sparked mass protests across the country and drawn concern from US officials.

Tens of thousands of Israelis rallied outside the parliament against the plans ahead of the vote, which finally took place in the early hours of Tuesday morning, after a turbulent debate during which opposition lawmakers chanted “shame” and wrapped themselves in Israeli flags.

The two changes on which the Knesset voted on Tuesday are part of a broader plan to rein in the judiciary that Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline new government, widely regarded as the most rightwing in Israel’s history, has made a priority since taking office two months ago.

The proposed changes have sparked political turmoil, with Israel’s president warning that the fight over the judiciary had brought the country to the verge of “constitutional and social collapse” and hundreds of thousands of Israelis joining weekly protests against the plans.

The reforms would give the government control over the appointment of judges and bar Israel’s top court from striking down the country’s quasi-constitutional Basic Laws. They must now pass two further votes in parliament in order to become law.

Government officials say the changes are needed to curb the powers of a judiciary that has used powers it was never formally granted to push a partisan, leftwing agenda. Netanyahu hailed the votes as “a great night, and a great day”.

But opponents including opposition parties, senior judicial officials, former security and central bank chiefs and executives from Israel’s powerful tech sector, see the proposals as a politically motivated power grab that will remove checks on the government, endanger minority protections, foster corruption and undermine the country’s economy.

Merav Michaeli, leader of the opposition Labor party, said that “everything” was at stake in the battle over the judiciary.

“It’s the character of the country, it’s people’s basic rights [that are at stake],” she said, warning that if enacted, the judicial changes could allow the passing of “laws that will narrow dramatically the equality and rights of anyone who is not in power at the moment”.

Eliad Shraga, head of the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, a group that has helped organise the protests, said the changes would concentrate power in the hands of Netanyahu. “He will decide everything,” he said. “Once the high court of justice can no longer protect the rights of minorities, it will be a disaster.”

In a sign of the growing unease among investors, US venture capital group Bessemer Venture Partners suggested that the Israeli start-ups in which it had invested limit their short-term exposure to the shekel and keep their dollar balances in US accounts.

The proposed changes have also prompted increasingly explicit expressions of concern from US officials. Over the weekend, Tom Nides, the US ambassador to Israel, told a podcast that Netanyahu’s government should “pump the brakes” and try to reach a consensus on the reforms.

“It’s very complicated, they’re trying to do things way too fast,” Nides said in an interview on The Axe Files podcast with David Axelrod, previously a senior adviser to former president Barack Obama.

“The one thing that binds our countries together is a sense of democracy and a sense of democratic institutions . . . That is how we defend Israel at the UN. When we believe that those democratic institutions are under stress and strain, we’re articulating [that]. That’s what we’re doing now.”

Nides’s comments drew an angry response from members of Netanyahu’s coalition, with Israel’s diaspora minister Amichai Chikli telling the state broadcaster Kan that the US was “not sovereign here”.

“I say to the American ambassador, put on the brakes yourself and mind your own business,” Chikli said.

Netanyahu himself told a gathering of American Jewish leaders that “all democracies should respect the will of other free peoples”.