Thursday, March 23, 2023

Fireworks fired at people protesting the right wing's planned subjugation of Israel's judiciary



Two summaries of today's protests from Israeli papers. ABC:
In a first step of the overhaul, Netanyahu’s parliamentary coalition approved legislation that would protect the Israeli leader from being deemed unfit to rule because of his trial and claims of a conflict of interest. Critics say the law is tailor-made for Netanyahu and encourages corruption.

The law to protect Netanyahu passed in a 61-47 vote in the 120-seat Knesset, or parliament, after a debate that ran through the night. It stipulates that a prime minister can only be deemed unfit to rule for health or mental reasons and that only he or his government can make that decision.
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 secular opponents to the changes fear they will open the door to religious coercion. They also object to exemptions granted to ultra-Orthodox men from military duty, which is mandatory for most Jews.

Israel's current public security minister:

a settler in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has faced charges of hate speech against Arabs and was known to have a portrait in his living room of Israeli-American terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. He removed the portrait after he entered politics. He was also previously convicted of supporting a terrorist group known as Kach, which espoused Kahanism, an extremist religious Zionist ideology

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When he came of age for conscription into the Israel Defense Forces at 18, he was exempted from service by the IDF due to his extreme-right political background

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In 1995, a few weeks before the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, [he] came to public attention for the first time when he appeared on television brandishing a Cadillac hood ornament that had been stolen from Rabin's car and declared: "We got to his car, and we'll get to him too."