Anti-Netanyahu protests mount after Israel passes controversial judicial bill

Israeli doctors began a 24-hour strike and black ads covered newspaper front pages on Tuesday in a furore over the hard-right government's ratification of the first part of a judicial overhaul that has prompted concern for the independence of the courts and Palestinian rights.

A bill curbing Supreme Court review of some government decisions passed in a stormy Knesset on Monday after a walkout by lawmakers who say long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing Israel towards autocracy.

With demonstrations convulsing Israeli society for months, thousands took to the streets on Monday night.

There were violent confrontations between protesters and Israeli police, leading to injuries and arrests in the cities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem as well as other areas, The New Arab's Arabic sister site Al-Araby Al-Jadeed reported.

Police forcefully removed demonstrators who closed a number of central streets for hours. They arrested at least 18 protesters and announced that a number of officers were injured.

Traditional ally the United States called the vote "unfortunate".

"A Black Day for Israeli Democracy," said an ad on the front of major newspapers placed by a group describing itself as worried hi-tech workers.

Protest leaders said growing numbers of military reservists would no longer report for duty.

But opposition leader Yair Lapid asked them to hold off on that threat, which has shaken Israel's sense of national security, pending any Supreme Court ruling on an appeal by a political watchdog group to void the law.

The Israel Medical Association ordered doctors to strike.

It cited the removal of the Supreme Court's ability to overrule, on the basis of "unreasonableness", potential government involvement in decisions by health ministry staff.

The 24-hour strike would not apply in Jerusalem, scene of escalating confrontations, it said. The government was seeking an injunction compelling doctors to return to work.

Netanyahu's crisis

First elected to top office in 1996 and now in his sixth term, Netanyahu, 73, is facing his biggest domestic crisis.

Casting the judicial changes as a redressing of balance among branches of government, he sought to calm the opposition – as well as Israel's Western allies – by saying on Monday he hoped to achieve consensus on any further legislation by November.

Critics charge the judicial overhaul could open the way to more authoritarian government by removing checks and balances on the Israeli executive.

There is also worry over how it could cause yet more damage to Palestinian rights, though Israeli demonstrators rarely raise the issue.

Complicating Netanyahu's position is a corruption trial in which he denies wrongdoing, and his weekend hospitalisation to receive a pacemaker.

His religious-nationalist coalition's expansion of illegal settlements on occupied land where Palestinians seek an independent state has also weighed on relations with Washington.

Israeli troops killed three Palestinians in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, saying this amounted to a "war crime".

The Israeli army alleged three "armed terrorists" had opened fire on its soldiers from a vehicle in a Nablus neighbourhood and the troops fired back "to neutralise" them.

Dogged by foreign investor flight, a swooning shekel and a threatened general strike by the Histadrut public sector union, far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told Army Radio: "The attempted casting of this as the end of democracy is simply false."

He brushed off opposition charges that Netanyahu, freed of Supreme Court intervention, would fire an attorney-general whom some ministers have described as recalcitrant on the judicial changes.

The military, Smotrich added, "is combat-ready and will remain combat-ready" despite the protesting reservists, whom he accused of trying to "put a gun to the head of the government".

(Reuters, AFP, The New Arab)