\nNew law, old feud <\/p>\n
The law is the latest development in a long-running dispute between the Netanyahu coalition and Israel\u2019s judiciary, particularly the current AG, Gali Baharav-Miara<\/a>.<\/p>\n Netanyahu has been attempting for several years<\/a> to sack Baharav-Miara, who was appointed by now-Opposition Leader Yair Lapid during his term as prime minister in a brief window between Netanyahu governments.<\/p>\n Ministers have argued that she has undemocratically thwarted the agenda of elected officials\u00a0and is biased against the government\u2019s right-wing stance, while her supporters allege that the prime minister is trying to remove checks and balances on his power amid a criminal trial into his alleged corruption.<\/p>\n In December, the Supreme Court blocked<\/a> the coalition\u2019s attempt to fire Baharav-Miara following a no-confidence vote from the Cabinet, ruling that the government had not followed the established process to remove an AG.<\/p>\n The new law will now change that process, allowing Baharav-Miara to be dismissed by such a vote.<\/p>\n However, it will not affect her authority as head of the state prosecution service, including her ability to open criminal investigations into public officials, which had been proposed in earlier versions of the bill.<\/p>\n Reacting to the vote, Democrats MK\u00a0Gilad Kariv, who has since filed a petition with the Supreme Court to strike down the law,\u00a0claimed it would \u201cplace the government above the rule of law and shatter the delicate system of checks and balances in Israeli democracy\u201d.<\/p>\n His party leader, Yair Golan<\/a>, went further still, suggesting that the coalition was trying \u201csteal the election\u201d, now scheduled for October 27, by removing checks on its power.<\/p>\n And Baharav-Miara herself said the new legislation\u00a0would likely be a violation of Israel\u2019s rule of law.<\/p>\n On the other side, Simcha Rothman MK of the Religious Zionism party,\u00a0head of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, who backed the bill, called it \u201ca historic change\u201d that \u201crestores legal advice to its natural role\u201d and \u201cstrengthens Israeli democracy\u201d.<\/p>\n One last twist? <\/p>\n The vote followed intense political wrangling between coalition leaders and the Charedi parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism (UTJ), which suggested they would not support the bill unless their demands were met.<\/p>\n These included bills\u00a0enshrining Torah study<\/a> in Israel\u2019s Basic Law and freezing the arrest and prosecution<\/a> of Charedi men who evade IDF conscription, both of which passed earlier this week.<\/p>\n Even then, Rothman was forced to filibuster his own bill for 90 minutes to allow last-minute negotiations to conclude after UTJ\u2019s Moshe Gafni threatened to pull his faction\u2019s support unless ministers approved tens of millions of shekels-worth of extra funding for Charedi daycares.<\/p>\n Gafni subsequently confirmed to the media that this funding had been approved, with reports suggesting a figure of NIS 39 million, saying: \u201cThis is another step in a process aimed at equalising the salary conditions of Charedi kindergarten teachers with those of their colleagues in mainstream education.<\/p>\n “I will continue to work until full equality is achieved, and I will not relent until this goal is achieved.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New law, old feud The law is the latest development in a long-running dispute between the Netanyahu coalition…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544474,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[14719,85,46,954,14406,43],"class_list":["post-544473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-editors-pick","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-israeli-politics","tag-knesset","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}