As unruly as some of the protests have been to date, none matched the intensity of the ones that materialized spontaneously late Sunday within minutes of the prime minister’s announcement.
“There comes a time in the history of a people or a person or an organization when you have to stand up and be counted,” Daniel Chamovitz, president of Ben-Gurion University, one of the colleges that announced it would shut its doors Monday, said in a phone interview. “With what’s happened in Israel over the past three months, and definitely over the past three hours, we decided that the time had come for us to make a stand.”
The protests were so fierce that governing lawmakers, who hours earlier had seemed confident of voting in their changes in the coming days, began to express doubts.
“Even
though judicial reform is essential, the house is on fire, the rift in
the nation is growing and our job is to stop it,” Miki Zohar, a lawmaker
from the prime minister’s party, Likud, said in television interview in
the early hours of Monday. “If Netanyahu takes the decision to postpone
a decision until after Independence Day” — in late April — Mr. Zohar
said, “we must all support him. Israel above everything, and our
security above all.”
