Israel’s coronavirus czar Ronni Gamzu has privately decried the government’s decision to order a full lockdown on the nation for the next two weeks, expressing disgust at the move and claiming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed to enforce harsher restrictions only after he learned that he could not stop protests against him otherwise, according to a report by Channel 13 news Thursday.
According to the network, Gamzu told associates he believed the decision was “terrible” and its motives “disgusting,” while musing that he felt had to take nausea pills after it was made.
If cleared through the Knesset Thursday night, the new legislation, set to come into force on Friday at 2 p.m., will see nearly all businesses closed, prayers and public protests severely curtailed, public transportation scaled back dramatically and Israelis ordered to remain close to home with far fewer exceptions than under the existing measures.
According to the report, Gamzu said that the move for harsher restrictions only began once legal experts informed Netanyahu, who was originally against the idea, that it was impossible to prevent the protests against him while large segments of the country remained open.
The next day, said Gamzu, “we were shocked at the change in his position, we woke up with [Netanyahu saying] ‘I want to impose a state of emergency in Israel.’”
Gamzu, a physician and director of Tel Aviv’s Ichilov hospital, reportedly told the cabinet that he didn’t believe a full lockdown of the economy was warranted, but wanted to achieve a “50 percent reduction” in economic activity that would dramatically reduce social contacts, while allowing the measures to last a long time.
Gamzu told reporters Thursday morning that he had recommended “tightening the lockdown, and not shutting down the entire country.” He publicly reiterated his opposition to the new lockdown restrictions set to be implemented Friday, saying the economic harm will be “tremendous.”
However, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu disagreed, preferring a comprehensive and immediate lockdown which he asserted would help reduce infection rates quickly. Netanyahu argued in the cabinet that the coming holidays — Yom Kippur begins Sunday evening and the eight-day Sukkot holiday begins October 2 — are periods when most Israelis won’t be working in any case. Imposing a lockdown over that period is less damaging to the economy than doing so after the holidays, he said.
According to Haaretz, one of the ministers who attended the cabinet meeting early Thursday morning that decided on further restrictions said: “It was clear that [Netanyahu’s] personal desire to cancel the demonstrations was in the background [of his decision-making process]. Every time someone said the word ‘demonstration’, he jumped.”
Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who leads the Blue and White party, had indicated on Wednesday afternoon he was similarly suspicious of Netanyahu’s motives, issuing a statement mid-day that the “obsessive discussion on the protest issue” must stop, calling it “disproportionate.”
But he later moved to back Netanyahu’s position in support of a full lockdown following a conversation between the two. It was not clear what changed Gantz’s mind.
Protests calling on the prime minister to quit over his corruption trial have been held throughout the country several times a week in recent months, boosted by frustration over his response to the pandemic and attacks on the justice system. Saturday night protests in Jerusalem have at times drawn tens of thousands.
Netanyahu and his allies have insisted the mass rallies are a dangerous infection vector, though there has been no data to support this.
Hundreds of people took part in demonstrations calling for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s resignation around the country Thursday, as protest leaders vowed to continue to rally within the confines of a tightened national lockdown which will controversially introduce limitations on protests as part of an effort to bring the coronavirus outbreak under control.
Some rallied at highway overpasses, while the largest gathering took place near Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s official residence in Jerusalem.
Protests outside Netanyahu’s residence will be allowed to continue with up to 2,000 participants at a time, as long as they are divided into 20-person “capsules.”
Critics have accused the prime minister of pushing through overbearing restrictions on movement and economic activity in order to also clamp down on the protests.
One by one Thursday, former senior members in Israel’s defense establishment spoke from a central podium at Paris Square. Many compared the current government’s failure to contain a raging coronavirus outbreak to the failures which preceded the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Former Air Force brigadier general Amir Haskel, a veteran activist whose brief arrest in late June sparked the current protest wave, said that the restrictions on demonstrations were about politics, not public health.
“I think that the prime minister’s decision yesterday is a flagrant conflict of interest. He simply cannot place restrictions on protests against him,” Haskel told The Times of Israel. “The decision is based solely on his desire to silence us.”
Haskel said that the organizers were planning on petitioning the High Court of Justice to overturn the restrictions. In the meantime, he said, demonstrations would continue across the country in accordance with the restrictions.
“Israel does not have a functioning prime minister, it has a criminal defendant who is destroying any good the country has,” the movement said in a statement. “Today, it is already clear to every citizen that the problem with the country is not the synagogues, not the demonstrations, it is the number one defendant Benjamin Netanyahu.”
Dozens of protesters also rallied outside the Knesset building. Several threw bags of cow dung in the direction of the parliament building, Channel 12 news reported.
Cyber and National Digital Matters Minister David Amsalem, who is also the liaison between the Knesset and government, was heckled by the protesters as he walked past them from the Knesset to the nearby Finance Ministry, the network reported.
As the crowd became increasingly vocal, Amsalem’s security detail hurried him into the Finance Ministry premises.
Amsalem, who later introduced the lockdown proposal for a Knesset vote at the plenum, accused opposition lawmakers of “leading anarchy” through the anti-government protests.
Apparently referring his earlier clash with protesters, lamented their lack of respect for a government minister, telling the plenum that some had shouted at him “thief, swindler, I paid you NIS 10,000, go to prison” as well as calling him “fat” and “stinking.”
Header: Following social-distancing regulations, protesters rally against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, outside his official residence in Jerusalem on September 24, 2020. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Source: TOI