Mother of soldier slain in captivity to Herzog: ‘Don’t you dare cancel Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial’

Maayan Sherman, whose soldier son Ron was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Hamas captivity, blames his death on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Ron was one of at least 42 hostages who reached Gaza alive and were killed there because of the decision of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who preferred dead hostages over a deal that would have brought everyone back alive but could have ended his rule,” Sherman says.

“Because of this loss,” Sherman says, she demands President Isaac Herzog turn down Netanyahu’s request this week that his corruption trial be abrogated.

“Don’t you dare cancel Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial,” she says. “Nobody in this country can be above the law… that’s a red line that Israel, as a democratic country, must not cross.”

Sherman also slams Netanyahu’s “coalition of crooks and parasites” for seeking to pass a “corrupt draft-dodging bill… at the expense of worn-out reservists.”

“We demand a real, independent, state commission of inquiry, not a politicized whitewashing committee designed to protect those responsible,” she adds, railing against the government’s effort to establish its own probe of the Hamas invasion. “We won’t let the people who were responsible on the day of the massacre judge themselves.”

“My duty as a mother did not end when Ron’s heart stopped beating,” she says. “This country deserves a chance to rebuild… after this bad government took so much from us.”

Speaking after her, Omri Ronen, an activist with the Brothers in Arms reservist protest group, hails the overwhelmingly secular crowd as Israel’s “serving, productive public, the locomotive of the country.”

“You all served in the army,” he tells the protesters. “This is a full wagon, full of talent and creativity and Jewish and humanist values,” he adds, alluding to a famous comment by ultra-Orthodox master Rabbi Abraham Yeshayahu Karelitz (Hazon Ish) to Israel’s first prime, David Ben Gurion, that secular Israelis were like an “empty wagon.”

Ronen says “the enormous energy that has emerged over the past three years” — since the protests against the judicial overhaul — will in the next election manifest in “a massive show of hope and synergy of people who’ve decided to build themselves and their country.”

If we keep faithfully charting the same path together, nothing can stop us,” he says. “You are the new pioneers.”