Hundreds of Israeli army reservists have informed the government that they won’t serve if Parliament approved curbs on the Supreme Court powers, according to a journalist.
“We just saw that hundreds of Israeli army reservists… already said today, this evening, that they’ll stop showing up for duty following the vote,” Noa Landau, the deputy editor-in-chief of Haaretz, told Christiane Amanpour of CNN on Monday.
She was responding to a query on “pro-democracy” protests against the move of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ultra-right coalition partners. They have not let up and military reservists were threatening not to serve.
The Israeli journalist started by saying that the protest movement was not happy to see Parliament passing the curbs.
Israel’s parliament ratified on Monday the first bill of a judicial overhaul sought by PM Netanyahu.
The amendment limiting the Supreme Court’s powers to void some government decisions if it deemed them “unreasonable” passed by a 64-to-0 vote after opposition lawmakers abandoned the session in protest, some of them shouting: “For shame!”
Landau added that there was a question about the presence of military reservists, including pilots who are critical to the country’s security.
It merits here to mention that they make the backbone of the Israeli state.
The deputy editor-in-chief of Haaretz reiterated that the Israeli prime minister was on trial and he had to form a coalition that only had the most extreme right-wing representatives in it
“This is the most religious & the most right-wing, extreme government that we ever had in our history,” she said.