The day after Israel’s Knesset passed the first of several bills to implement a highly controversial restructuring of the judicial system, Israeli expats and their American allies protested the changes in front of the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco.
Tuesday morning’s protest was the second such demonstration in three days in the Bay Area.
The protest, organized by the Israeli expat pro-democracy group UnXeptable, drew as many as 200 people who chanted “De-mo-kra-tiya!” (“democracy” in Hebrew), listened to speakers and held signs with slogans including “Save Israel from Netanyahu,” “Israel democracy kidnapped by extremists” and “Reform Judaism, not the judiciary.”
One of the speakers was Eduardo Wasser, an Israeli constitutional lawyer who once successfully persuaded his country’s Supreme Court to overturn a government decision on the basis of “reasonableness.” The legislation that the Knesset passed on Monday removed the Supreme Court’s ability to use the “reasonableness” justification to overturn government actions.
“I stand before you today representing the majority of lawyers who oppose the catastrophic legal revolution being pushed by the extreme-led Israeli government in the Knesset recently,” he said before chants of “Busha! Busha! Busha!” (“Shame! Shame! Shame!”) interrupted him.
“If the legal situation in Israel continues and Netanyahu’s judicial coup continues, as suggested by the passage of the reasonableness bill yesterday, the democracy of the State of Israel is heading swiftly downhill,” Wasser told the crowd.
In 2007, Wasser was the lead attorney on a case in which three Israeli regional councils sued the government, alleging that the protection from rocket attacks for Israeli schoolchildren near the Gaza Strip was insufficient — “unreasonably” so.
“I stand here as an Israeli citizen,” he said Tuesday, “but more importantly as a father who can say with absolute certainty that there was a high chance that some of my three children and the children of people living [near the Gaza Strip] would not be alive today if it weren’t for the right of the court to revoke government decisions on the basis of lack of reasonability.”
