Covid and the Courts

As Israel faces a second lockdown amid spiking Covid infections, it is utterly disgraceful that the packed protests are allowed to continue nightly outside Netanyahu's office and home in Jerusalem.

Anyone who knows Bibi will tell you that even if the mob were three or four times the size, it would not intimidate him into leaving office. He knows who is funding and fuelling this campaign and will never cave in to it.

But what's more important is the flagrant abuse of Covid rules. Thousands of people packed into a tight area, mostly unmasked and literally spitting the most hysterical abuse is a clear public health violation.

And yet left-wing judges continue to ignore the pleas of local residents to order a stop and allow them to get their children to sleep at night. The right to demonstrate and freedom of speech are deemed more important than the health and wellbeing of law abiding citizens who believe in the democratic process.

Compare this to the right wing Jewish protests against the Oslo Accords nearly 30 years ago. Judges of the same stripe were quick to clamp down, ruling that the right to demonstrate was "not absolute" and needed to be balanced with the right to privacy of the prime minister, his family and neighbors.

One rule for Rabin and another for Netanyahu.