Hundreds of people started congregating outside the Knesset and in the heart of Tel Aviv this morning as demonstrations against the Netanyahu administration's judicial reform show no signs of slowing down. In preparation for the main demonstration, which begins at 2 pm, protesters from all around the nation go to the capital. At the Hashalom Interchange, the entry to Tel Aviv's Ayalon Highway is once more closed. After the dismissal of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, demonstrators blocked the road for a number of hours overnight. Also, thousands of Israelis are protesting in Haifa. As demonstrators tried to scale fence barriers around Prime Minister Netanyahu's home, police fired water cannons to scatter them. Universities have declared a permanent strike. Arnon Bar-David, general secretary of the Histadrut union, has declared a historic workers' strike in an effort to halt the folly of the divisive judicial reform that the Netanyahu administration is pushing for.
The immediate stoppage of departures was declared by the Pinchas Idan labor union at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. The McDonald's chain outlets are closed due to the strike in the high-tech industry. On Saturday, Netanyahu, for his part, reaffirmed the need for judicial review due to the Supreme Court's excessive power. The pivotal blunder, however, occurred on Sunday night when Defense Minister Yoav Gallant was fired by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, one day after the Likud member demanded that the government's judicial review law be put on hold.Overnight, the action provoked widespread, unplanned protests across the nation. At a private session of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset, Gallant had expressed concern that the judicial review legislation put Israel's security in jeopardy. The leader of the defense committee for the Likud party, Yuli Edelstein, intervened on the minister's behalf who had urged Netanyahu to halt the court review.
During a meeting with the coalition's leaders, Israeli media reported that Netanyahu will declare in the evening that he would oppose the judicial reform that would limit judges' authority. We do not yet know if this action will cause a rift within the majority. Even the Minister of Justice, Yariv Levin, appears to be in favor of the reform's temporary suspension, joining other Likud members and the Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, a member of the far-right Religious Zionism party who recently made statements from Paris that shook international relations. Itamar Ben Gvir, the leader of Otzama Yehudit and Minister of Public Security, disagrees with the coalition's other members' political views and has threatened to collapse the government since, in his view, abandoning the reform would entail giving up to anarchists. Palestinian media keeps a careful eye on what's going on in Israel. The violent riots in Israel were the primary front-page item in the newspaper al-Hayat al-Jadida.