I’d like to think that these lines will be overtaken by developments, for the better, before you’ve even had the chance to read them.
But at this moment, early on the afternoon of Wednesday, March 25, Israeli democracy appears to have fallen off a cliff.
In an unprecedented act of defiance, the speaker of the Knesset, Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, has opted to resign rather than obey a ruling from the High Court of Justice that he must hold a vote Wednesday on who is to fill his speaker’s post in the wake of the March 2 elections. Blue and White leader Benny Gantz has the support of 61 of the Knesset’s 120 MKs who want to elect Blue and White MK Meir Cohen to the position, and thence to gain control of the parliamentary agenda and proceedings from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and its allies.
Rather than allow this to happen, Edelstein shuttered the Knesset on March 18, then rebuffed a High Court directive issued midday Monday to hold the vote by today, and has now rejected a subsequent binding High Court ruling that he must do so.
Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein gives a press statement in the Knesset in Jerusalem on November 27, 2019. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Not only has Edelstein resigned in a flurry of aggrieved criticism of the judiciary for its ostensible dangerous and undemocratic intervention in matters of parliamentary procedure, however, but he has also noted that his resignation only takes effect in 48 hours and has meantime again shuttered the Knesset plenum. New petitions to the High Court argue that he is thus acting in contempt, since he has refused to comply with its ruling and is preventing anybody else from complying with it either. READ MORE
