Updated 2023-12-09
2023-08-10 How Israel Occupied Itself On July 24th, the Israeli Knesset passed a measure forbidding the country’s High Court of Justice from in any way checking the power of the government, whether in making cabinet decisions or appointments, based on what’s known as the “reasonability” standard. In the Israeli context, this was an extreme act, since right-wing parliamentarians were defying massive crowds that had, for months on end, demonstrated with remarkable determination against such radical legislation. And that measure was only one part of a wide-ranging redesign of the court system unveiled by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in January, which deeply alarmed his critics.
As exemplified by prominent world historian Yuval Noah Harari, such protestors warned that limiting the functions of the highest court, in a land with a parliamentary system largely lacking other checks and balances, represented a big stride toward a future autocracy. After all, dangers abound in a nation with a one-chamber legislature, lacking the equivalent of a Senate, that elects the prime minister as the instrument of its will.
The central motivation for that legislation, however, lay not in domestic politics but in the desire of extremists in the cabinet to ensure that the courts won’t be able to interfere with their plans to vastly increase the number of Israeli squatter-settlements on Palestinian land on the West Bank and perhaps someday soon simply annex that occupied territory. Under such circumstances, members of the far-right Religious Zionist Party were recently excoriated by Tamir Pardo, a former head of Israeli intelligence, as Israel’s “Ku Klux Klan.” https://tomdispatch.com/how-israel-occupied-itself/
2023-03-21 Protesting reservists threaten mass refusal to serve over judiciary shakeup Organizers of group representing reserve soldiers say they are beginning to sign thousands on declaration to not show up for duty if overhaul bills are passed. The group, known as Brothers in Arms, said they would begin to sign reservists on to a declaration of refusal to serve, which would be implemented should the government move ahead with the judicial overhaul.
“We have been protesting in the streets for 11 weeks. An executive branch with unlimited power is a dictatorship. We are afraid of it. If the laws of the dictatorship are enacted, a people’s army cannot exist. A people’s army only exists in a democracy,” said Lt. Col. (res.) Ron Scherf, one of the founders of Brothers in Arms. https://www.timesofisrael.com/protesting-reservists-threaten-mass-refusal-to-serve-over-judiciary-shakeup/
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Categorized Directory: News and Articles about Israel- Palestine Conflict
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