The message is started. Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Monday called on the government to “immediately” halt legislative work on the country-dividing judicial reform bill. “We witnessed very difficult scenes last night,” the president said in a statement released by his office. “The entire nation is in deep concern. Our security, our economy and our society are all threatened,” added the president, who solemnly appealed “to the Prime Minister, to the members of the government and to those of the majority.”
“All the people of Israel are watching you. All the Jewish people are watching you. The whole world is watching you,” adds Isaac Herzog, whose repeated calls for a compromise on reform have so far been unsuccessful and have not prevented the country from slipping into crisis.
“In the name of the unity of the people of Israel (…), I call on you to immediately stop” the legislative process, added the leader, who plays an essentially ceremonial role.
Arnon Bar-David, leader of the Histadrut, Israel’s largest trade union federation, announced an immediate “general strike” Monday at a press conference, and demanded a halt to the government’s judicial reform and which deeply divides the country. “I call for a general strike (…) as soon as this press conference ends, the State of Israel stops,” he said.
In a press release, the Crif (Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France) “calls on the Israeli government to suspend the reform in progress in order to restore calm and dialogue with the whole of society as soon as possible”. He specifies that “this request comes in unison with that of personalities on the right and on the left, in Israel and in the Diaspora”.
“Given the deep division generated in the entire Jewish world, it is no longer a question of political measures which it is not for the Crif to comment on, but of preserving the unity of the Jewish people”, adds the Crif. The latter “reaffirms his absolute attachment to the founding democratic principles of the State of Israel and to its unity”.
On Sunday evening, thousands of people took to the streets in Tel Aviv after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu sacked his defense minister, a supporter of a pause in the judicial reform the government wants to pass. in Parliament.
The reform project proposed by the government of Benyamin Netanyahu, one of the most right-wing in the history of Israel, aims to increase the power of elected officials over that of judges.
Contested in the street for almost three months, he is at the origin of one of the greatest popular mobilization movements in the history of this Middle Eastern country. Critics of the reform believe that it risks jeopardizing the democratic character of the State of Israel.
