Ex-PM Olmert: Israel Heading to Civil War

 Doctors Declare Strike

OCCUPIED AL-QUDS (KI) – Israeli doctors declared a strike and black ads covered newspaper front pages on Tuesday in a backlash over the hard-right regime’s ratification of the first part of a judicial overhaul that would give prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu draconian powers.

With Netanyahu facing his gravest domestic crisis, the Zionist regime’s military took its first known internal disciplinary action over the protests. One reservist was fined 1,000 shekels ($270) and another given a suspended 15-day jail sentence for ignoring call-ups.
“A Black Day” for Israel, read the ad on the front of major newspapers placed by a group describing itself as worried hi-tech workers.
The bill curbing supreme court review of some decisions passed in a stormy Knesset parliament on Monday after an opposition walkout. As the vote took place, protesters were out in their thousands, some scuffling with police.
Protest leaders said growing numbers of military reservists would no longer report for duty if the regime continued with its plans. Former top brass have warned that Israel’s war-readiness could be at risk.
The crisis has opened a deep divide in Israeli society and hit the economy hard by triggering foreign investor flight, weakening the shekel and raising the specter of a general strike by the Histadrut public sector union.
It has also strained ties with the West including close ally the United States which called Monday’s vote “unfortunate”.
The Israel Medical Association ordered doctors to strike for 24 hours around the occupied territories, though not in Al-Quds, which is the scene of escalating confrontations.
However, the Tel Aviv regional labor court ordered the doctors to
 return to work, backing a regime injunction request.
Disquiet spread to the arts: divided audience members heckled and applauded a cast member in a popular musical in Tel Aviv as he read a statement on the crisis and a fellow actor strode off stage in apparent exasperation, according to video on social media.
Angering critics further, Netanyahu’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish coalition partners said they would submit legislation shoring up exemption from mandatory military service for their constituents who are studying in seminaries. But Netanyahu’s Likud party said no such bill would be pursued for now.
Complicating Netanyahu’s position is a corruption trial, and his weekend hospitalization to receive a pacemaker. His extremist coalition’s expansion of settlements on occupied land where Palestinians seek statehood has also weighed on relations with Washington.
Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah on Monday said Israel’s domestic crisis showed it was on a “path of collapse and fragmentation”.
Three protesters were injured in a car ramming on Tuesday as a former prime minister said Israel is heading to “civil war”.
The driver, allegedly a West Bank settler, drove at high speed into a huge group of protestors on Route 531, hitting dozens of people and causing a fire to erupt as the vehicle passed through the crowd.
“The car just zoomed toward us,” a witness told Haaretz. “I saw several people on the ground and him running away,” said another. “He didn’t stop for a moment.”
Police have arrested a suspect, but many observers have drawn stark comparisons with how suspects of car-ramming incidents are treated when the driver is Palestinian.
“This antisemitic terrorist has attacked citizens of occupied Palestine. With a car ramming attack - he is alive. The police didn’t shoot him. In Palestinians cases it is death penalty without charge,” tweeted an anonymous user.
Figures within the Israeli political establishment are raising the alarm over the prospect of civil war, with the sight of attacks on fellow citizens in the streets appearing to cross a Rubicon.
“This is the first time the regime of Israel declared war on the people,” former prime minister Ehud Olmert told Israeli Army radio.
Olmert said he “supports the demonstration” scheduled to take place at Ben Gurion airport on Wednesday against Netanyahu’s planned judicial overhaul, and has endorsed non-violent civil disobedience.
“This a serious threat that has never happened before and we are going into a civil war now,” said the former PM.
Two months the ruling extremist governing coalition delayed plans to make wholesale changes to the Israeli judiciary, pending a ‘consultation period’, the Knesset is now deciding on re-drafts of the initial bill.