Israel Boils as Netanyahu Ousts Minister Who Bucked Court OverhaulNY Times, Mar 26, 2023
Civil unrest broke out in parts of Israel Sunday night after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister for criticizing the government’s divisive judicial overhaul, prompting protesters to surge into the streets, universities to shut their doors, and union leaders to hint of a looming general strike.
Announced in a one-line statement by the prime minister’s office, the dismissal of Yoav Gallant intensified an already dramatic domestic crisis — one of the gravest in Israeli history — set off by the government’s attempt to give itself greater control over the selection of Supreme Court justices and to limit the court’s authority over Parliament.
Mr. Gallant’s dismissal unleashed chaotic late-night demonstrations in and around Tel Aviv, where protesters blocked a multilane highway and set fires in at least two major roads, and in Jerusalem, where crowds broke through police barriers outside Mr. Netanyahu’s private residence.
[...]
Mr. Gallant was fired after he urged on Saturday night that the judicial legislation be postponed, warning that it was causing turmoil in the military and was therefore a threat to Israel’s security.
“The rift within our society is widening and penetrating the Israel Defense Forces,” Mr. Gallant said in a televised speech a day before he was dismissed. The schisms, he said, have caused “a clear and immediate and tangible danger to the security of the state — I shall not be a party to this.”
His declaration followed a surge in military reservists’ refusing to fulfill their volunteer duty in protest of the judicial overhaul. Military leaders had warned that a decline in reservists, who form a key part of the air force pilot corps, might soon affect the military’s operational capacity.
Mr. Netanyahu did not issue a full explanation for his decision to fire Mr. Gallant. But briefing Israeli news reporters, his office said that Mr. Gallant had not done enough to dissuade reservists from refusing to serve, implying that Mr. Gallant had helped stoke the security risks he warned of.
If Mr. Netanyahu’s goal in firing Mr. Gallant was to muscle through the judicial changes, presenting his country with a fait accompli and neutralizing the opposition, it may have backfired. As unruly as some of the protests have been to date, none matched the intensity of the ones that materialized spontaneously late Sunday within minutes of the prime minister’s announcement.
“There comes a time in the history of a people or a person or an organization when you have to stand up and be counted,” Daniel Chamovitz, president of Ben-Gurion University, one of the colleges that announced it would shut its doors Monday, said in a phone interview. “With what’s happened in Israel over the past three months, and definitely over the past three hours, we decided that the time had come for us to make a stand.”
The protests were so fierce that governing lawmakers, who hours earlier had seemed confident of voting in their changes in the coming days, began to express doubts that they could do so.
More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/26/world/middleeast/judiciary-overhaul-benjamin-netanyahu-israel-parliament.html