US envoy says government won’t advance entire overhaul, reaction would be dramatic

US Ambassador Tom Nides says he does not believe Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government will unilaterally advance all of the judicial overhaul legislation.

“I do not believe they’re going to wake up and do all of this legislation unilaterally. I do not believe that will happen… I think the reaction here would be quite dramatic,” Nides says during an event organized by the Jewish Democratic Council of America, referencing the magnitude of anti-overhaul protests of recent months.

Netanyahu’s coalition began unilaterally advancing a relatively smaller part of the overhaul package this week in legislation to restrict judicial review, but some critics fear that the government is merely seeking to advance each piece of the plan, rather than all of it at once, recognizing that the blowback from the latter strategy would be much more fierce.

Nides goes on to maintain that the overhaul “was never the prime minister’s major objective when he became prime minister. Now, his coalition partners have a different objective,” but Netanyahu is more interested in combating Iran and securing a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia.