JERUSALEM — A right-wing protest brought some 200,000 people to Jerusalem’s streets on April 27 to demonstrate in favor of the government’s judicial reform.
Right-wing Israelis attend a rally in support of the government’s planned judicial overhaul, outside the Knesset in Jerusalem, April 27, 2023. (Arie Leib Abrams/Flash90)
The demonstration was meant to be an answer to the anti-reform demonstrations that have filled Tel Aviv’s streets.
Both the pro- and the anti- demonstrations featured lots of Israeli flags, chants to the tune of “Seven Nation Army” and signs declaring that the rally represents the majority of the country.
Like the protests in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem’s mass gathering felt driven by grievance: a sense that the election the rally-goers had fought for was being taken away from them, given that they had won the previous election in December.
“There are those who have decided that they can make decisions for me, even though they have no right to decide for me,” said Michal Verzberger, who came from the central town of Mazkeret Batya with most of her family to protest in favor of the reforms.
The reforms would alter the way Supreme Court justices are chosen, would limit judicial authority to matters of law and exclude matters of legislation, would require that the Attorney General, as he represents the government, defend the government in court, and would restore to the Knesset the power it exercised up until the 1990s to overturn Supreme Court decisions.
Verzberger was echoing a central message of last week’s protest: that the right won the recent elections, in which judicial reform was one of the campaign issues, and had every right to pass its desired judicial overhaul.
“The nation decided it wanted reform, and there are some who are protesting the reform, and they’re deciding in our place that there won’t be a reform,” she said. “The minority is deciding what is good for the majority.”
The idea that a loud minority is unjustly obstructing the will of the electorate inspired the protest.
Since the judicial reform was proposed at the beginning of the year, hundreds of thousands have filled the streets — in Tel Aviv and elsewhere — weekly to decry the proposal as a danger to democracy.
Those protests led Israel’s right-wing government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to pause the reforms for a month — a period that ends in days.
The governing coalition and opposition are now negotiating over the legislation, a process that, if successful, will by definition soften the reforms.
Last week’s rally was a show of force that aimed to strengthen the position of the government majority, several protesters said. One of the crowd’s chants was “64 seats” — the majority the right-wing holds in Israel’s 120-seat parliament, the Knesset. One homemade sign read, “64 > 56.”
Although the 64 seats represent a slim majority of the 120-seat Knesset, it is the largest majority in a ruling Israel coalition in many years.
The government ministers who spoke at the rally promised that despite the delays, the substance of the reform would become law.
“We will not give up,” said Bezalal Smotrich, the finance minister.
“We won’t give up on making Israel a better place to live. We won’t give up on the Jewish state . . . We’re fixing what needs to be fixed, and promising a better state of Israel for us and for the coming generations. “Most of the nation agrees that the judicial reform is the right and necessary thing to do for the state of Israel, and I say again: We will not give up.”
Israel’s electorate has had a right-wing majority for years, both according to polls and election results.
While the ideological bent of coalitions has varied, the past 22 years have seen only several months — last year — with a prime minister who didn’t build his career in conservative politics.
The court reform has been pushed through the Knesset without any support from opposition parties.
Yariv Levin, the justice minister and architect of the judicial overhaul, said, “Two million Israelis, half a year a year ago, voted in the true referendum: the elections. They voted for judicial reform.”
Opponents of the judicial reform and the Biden administrations have said that provisions of the judicial reform could damage Israel’s democratic character by limiting the independence of its judiciary.
Protesters said that, rather than destroy democracy, the overhaul would restore balance to Israel’s branches of government, curbing an activist court that exercises powers not exercised by Supreme Courts in other democracies.
“I want a real democracy in the state of Israel,” said Chanan Fine, a resident of the central city of Modiin.
“In a democracy there are three branches that have balance between them, and what has happened is that the judicial branch has taken for itself the powers of the legislative branch and the executive branch.
The message of the protests wasn’t the only thing that separated it from the anti-reform Tel Aviv demonstrations, which largely draw secular Israelis.
While few haredi Israelis attended the pro-reform event — a leading haredi newspaper instructed its readers not to go, even as it expressed support for the cause — religious ritual pervaded the demonstration.
Men gathered in prayer quorums before sunset on the way to the protest, and rallygoers recited the Shema and traditional prayers for salvation en masse. Most of the men wore kippahs, and most of the women wore long skirts.
Some signs at the Tel Aviv rallies, in addition to opposing the overhaul, advocate for LGBTQ rights or Israeli-Palestinian peace. Signs and shirts at the Jerusalem rally trumpeted settlements in the West Bank.
One thing that the two rallies had in common: a preponderance of Israeli flags, something that has been particularly noted at the anti-overhaul demonstrations.
“It’s a desecration of our symbol,” Chen Avital, a protester from the West Bank settlement of Shilo, said about the anti-government protesters’ adoption of the flag.
“They took it for a certain side that isn’t supported by the whole country, and they changed it to their side over the past few months . . . It’s a flag that represents all of us, and they took it for their own side.”
