OVER 10,000 people took to the streets of the main Israeli city of Tel Aviv on Saturday in protest against the policies unveiled last week by the new right-wing government led by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
On Wednesday, Netanyahu’s newly installed Justice Minister, Yariv Levin, revealed his plans to tear up the Israeli judicial system by giving absolute power to the ruling party coalition with an Override Clause. Under this plan, the majority of the Israeli parliament (Knesset) will be allowed to overrule any decisions by the Israeli Supreme Court. It would take away the power and authority of the court to block legislation or government decisions which would otherwise be held to be discriminatory or undemocratic.
The protesters accused the Netanyahu government, a coalition of extreme right-wingers and fascists, of declaring war on the Israeli legal system, saying the plan will upend the system of ‘checks and balances’ and undermine Israel’s ‘democratic institutions’ by giving absolute power to the governing coalition.
According to media reports, protesters waved LGBTQ pride flags. Palestinian flags were also present with placards that read: ‘The settler government is against me’ and ‘Democracy in danger’ and even one banner that read ‘crime minister’. One demonstrator from the Standing Together group told the Jerusalem Post: ‘Extremists and dangerous actors in the newly established government are already planning on how to hurt all of us’ adding the plan of the reactionary coalition was ‘How to deepen racial discrimination against Arab citizens, how to cut social budgets, how to discriminate on gender.’
The activist group called the Black Flag movement, which reportedly organised Saturday’s protests, called the plan to overrule the Supreme Court a ‘coup d’état’ and vowed to continue protests stating: ‘Today we are starting the most important journey: a preventative strike against dictatorship.’ Palestinians have been on this ‘journey’ of struggle against the dictatorship of the Zionist state ever since its creation by imperialism.
The Zionist extremists who are now in power are seizing the moment to strip away the façade of Israeli democracy and the ‘rule of law’ replacing it with a dictatorship of religious zealots and fascist elements who openly call for the forced removal of every Palestinian and Arab in a violent campaign of ethnic cleansing.
The results of this new regime are fast becoming apparent. Last week, the Israeli national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has convictions for anti-Arab racism and is an open supporter of Zionist terrorism, toured the Al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem surrounded by Israeli troops in a move slammed as a deliberate provocation, with even the US criticising this for inflaming tensions with the Palestinians.
None of this criticism and pleas not to inflame an already incendiary situation have any effect on Netanyahu’s government. Yesterday, Ben-Gvir ordered police to ban Palestinian flags from public places as part of the punitive actions taken against Palestinians by the coalition since it was installed last month. It has withheld £32.9 million of tax revenues due to the Palestinian Authority (PA), and police even broke up a meeting of Palestinian parents discussing their children’s education on the pretext it was ‘unlawfully funded’ by the PA.
New laws are in preparation to legitimise the mass extension of settlements and the destruction of Palestinian homes and businesses as Netanyahu’s coalition, having obtained a majority, is now going for broke in the war to drive Palestinians from their own land and to come down on any Israeli citizen who doesn’t fit their reactionary, racist Zionist ideology.
The Palestinians are preparing to meet this onslaught with a third Intifada (uprising) that will be a fight to put an end to the Zionist state and establish the Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. The time has come for the British trade unions to step up to the plate and put all the motions and declarations of support for the struggle of the Palestinians into practice by calling for a total boycott of Israel and give all the material support to the Palestinians for victory and the building of the secular state of Palestine in 2023.
