JERUSALEM – MARCH 27: Israelis, carrying Israeli flags and anti-government placards, gather outside the Knesset to protests against the Israeli government’s plan to introduce judicial changes.
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The government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu survived a no-confidence vote in the Knesset, the country’s parliament, amid what is possibly the largest wave of demonstrations in Israel’s history.
Mass protests are rocking Israel, and the country’s largest labor union announced a major strike Monday in opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s months-long attempt to push through widely-derided judicial reforms that opponents say will pull the country toward an autocracy.
“Stop this judicial process before it is too late,” Arnon Bar-David, Israel’s Histadrut union leader, said in a televised speech, addressing Netanyahu directly. Histadrut — which at 800,000 members represents the majority of Israel’s trade unionists — declared a “historic” general strike to “stop this judicial revolution, this craziness,” Bar-David said.
Minister of Security Itamar Ben Gvir on Monday said the government must proceed with the reforms.
“The reform of the justice system must not be stopped and we must not surrender to anarchy,” he said on Twitter, according to a Google translation.
Strike paralysis
Flights out of Israel’s Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv have been suspended, as airport workers go on strike, and laborers at Haifa port — the largest in Israel — have also stopped working. McDonald’s Israel says it has closed branches as part of the strike action.
Protests have taken place across Israel for the last four months, sparked by anger at controversial judicial reforms pushed by Netanyahu’s government, the most right-wing in Israel’s history. The planned overhaul would significantly weaken the country’s judiciary and make it harder to remove Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, from power.
The proposed…
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