Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Israeli Air Force, like its other armed forces, heavily depends on reservists. That was why Egypt was able to surprise Israel in the 1973 War, which they launched on the holy day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when reservists were with their families.
The reservists are required to perform periodic training, but 37 reservists have announced that they won’t show up for their F-15 refresher course this time. They are protesting the plans of the extremist government of Binyamin Netanyahu to neuter the Supreme Court. So reports Al Jazeera Arabic.
The striking pilots are from the “Hammer Squadron,” which flies F-15Is against distant targets. It is based in Hatzrim Air Base in Beersheba, southern Israel. This squadron is deployed against Iranian targets in Syria.
Al Jazeera relays Israeli news reports from inside the military that the movement to boycott military duties to protest Netanyahu’s plans for the judiciary constitutes the most severe security threat Israel has faced since the 1973 war.
Veteran Israeli politician and former parliamentarian and state minister Haim Ramon told Israel’s Channel 12 that refusing military service “is a complete dismantling of Israeli society, this is a breaking of all legitimate things in the country.”
Haaretz reports an unprecedented number of refuseniks, Israeli reservists who say they will decline to serve if the judiciary is tampered with.
There has also been a small upswing in Israeli young men refusing to serve in the West Bank because of the colonial and Apartheid conditions they are expected to implement there.
At the same time, El Al reports that it initially had trouble finding pilots to take Netanyahu to Italy.
By the way, it is shameful that Netanyahu is planning to consort with the fascist government of Giorgia Meloni, who stands in the tradition of Benito Mussolini. Under Mussolini, the Italian gendarmes became helpmeets of the Nazis and helped round up 7,780 of the estimated 44,500 Jews living in Italy, sending them to the death camps. Meloni was a member of the Youth Front of the fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI) founded in 1946 by Mussolini supporters. MSI morphed into the National Alliance and then into Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (FDI). The FDI has declined to disavow its smelly origins. Meloni, like a lot of European white nationalists, speaks well of Israel because she sees it as standing against the brown Muslim hordes. If Netanyahu manages to hitch a ride to Rome, no doubt it will be a love fest.
Netanyahu wants the ruling party to have more say over appointments of justices, and when the Supreme Court strikes down a piece of legislation as contrary to the principles of Israel’s Organic Law, he wants parliament to be able to overrule the justices with a simple majority. This change would have the effect of removing legislative review as one of the prerogatives of the court.
The change is also a sop to the fascist Israeli Religious Zionism bloc, which doesn’t want the Supreme Court interfering in illegal squatting on the Palestinian West Bank, which it intends to colonize and annex.
Investors and entrepreneurs in Israel are afraid of a parliamentary dictatorship. In a parliamentary system, once a government is elected it can stay in power for a long time, and if the government is backed by a cohesive party or coalition of parties, it can legislate and decree as it pleases, without any let or hindrance except the courts. If Netanyahu’s alteration is adopted, Israel’s system will move closer to Vladimir Lenin’s conception of “democratic centralism,” in which free discussion and dissent is allowed before a decision is made by the ruling party, but once it makes a decree it must be implemented with iron discipline.
Netanyahu is already branding Israeli protesters “terrorists.”
For his part, Netanyahu benefited from the dumping practices of corrupt casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who was once accused of managing to keep his license in Macao by providing working girls to the Chinese legislators on his case. Adelson funded a “newspaper,” ‘Israel Today,’ which he just gave away for free, and which backed Netanyahu to the hilt. Netanyahu let the owner of Yediot Aharanot, the business of which was suffering, know that if they gave him favorable coverage, he would ask Adelson to print fewer copies of his free rag. Netanyahu is on trial for corruption, and this incident is one of the charges against him. He wants to gut the courts before he is convicted so as to stay out of jail and gain some sort of amnesty for his crimes.
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