TEL AVIV — Some 200,000 people gathered in Jerusalem Thursday evening to protest the suspension of the government-led judicial overhaul, which critics contend amounts to a constitutional coup.
It was a strange rally: An elected government that enjoys a solid, stable parliamentary majority organized a mass protest against itself. Though the judicial reform has been the pet project of the Netanyahu government since coming into power, that same government decided March 27 to suspend the controversial reforms and begin talks with its opponents on a compromise.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not address the Jerusalem crowd. Instead, leading the protest were Netanyahu’s top hard-line government partners, including Justice Minister Yariv Levin, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
The protest seemed timed to boost the stalled reform efforts just before the Knesset’s May 1 return from spring recess. Critics view it as a desperate last-ditch effort by the government to retake the country’s streets from the hundreds of thousands of pro-democracy protesters demonstrating throughout the country for the past four months. On Tuesday evening, while the national Independence Day ceremony was underway in Jerusalem, a mass alternative Independence Day party was held on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street, the hub of the pro-democracy protests.
