Gantz says Netanyahu has ‘national duty’ to return to overhaul compromise negotiations

Opposition party head MK Benny Gantz offers to enter immediate negotiations with the coalition in order to develop a consensus approach to changing the judicial “reasonableness” test, as a bill to outlaw its application to the cabinet and ministers’ decisions speeds towards passage.

Gantz says that his condition is that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commit to only advancing the rest of government’s sweeping judicial reform ambitions through consensus, a condition that Netanyahu’s coalition has repeatedly rejected.

“I call on Netanyahu and all the responsible members of this house – you have a national duty to accept the proposal,” Gantz says, speaking to the press from the Knesset.

“This evening we can convene at the President’s Residence,” the site of consensus reform talks until they were frozen in June, “and discuss finding an agreed-upon framework for the reasonableness test, in a way that will not open a window to corruption and will preserve the principles of democracy,” the National Unity leader says.

His offer, he stresses, is conditional upon all future judicial changes only progressing through “consensus.”

“This is also the basic condition for dialogue – that the prime minister commit, in the presence and with the backing of the president, that if we reach agreements, from now on judicial and governance reforms will be carried out only by broad agreement, including all the legislative elements discussed at the President’s Residence,” Gantz says.

“No further legislation will be advanced without broad consensus,” he adds.