Amid the furor over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to pause his government’s judicial reform legislation, Likud MK Nissim Vaturi expressed the belief that the reforms will ultimately go ahead and that a temporary halt was necessary in order to “maintain national unity.”
“We had reached a very difficult situation,” he told Israel National News, “and that only served to illustrate just how important these reforms are. It also became abundantly clear just how far the system is skewed toward one side of the debate.”
Vaturi also suggested that his party could have done better in the job of explaining the essence of the reforms to the nation. “It seems that we made mistakes in the marketplace of words and ideas. The reforms will create balance in the Judicial Selection Committee, but people are relating to it as if we stole their entire world from them. That was our mistake in the way we promoted what we’re doing.” He added that once a new way forward is found, it should be possible to work together with certain elements from the opposition parties with whom one can reach understandings over key parts of the reforms.

“We have to reach broad understandings, not just because of the situation we’re in, but also because of our security needs,” he stressed. “We have more important things to deal with than this,” he added, explaining that while the reforms are genuinely important, they should be related to as a number of pieces of legislation to be addressed one at a time, rather than as a single unit. “I support the reforms, but there are other ways of advancing them and that’s what we’ll be doing. We aren’t going to stop. This is what we’re here to do.”
Asked to comment on the premier’s decision to dismiss Defense Minister Yoav Gallant from his position, Vaturi emphasized that while Gallant’s position on the reforms played a role, there were other, more critical issues that led to the decision to remove him, such as the minister’s decision to hold a press conference while the Prime Minister was abroad, even though the two men had agreed between them that they would wait for Netanyahu to return to the country when they would coordinate their future steps together.
“He didn’t adhere to the rules,” Vaturi said. “We’re a right-wing government and its members have to know how to behave appropriately.” He added that he has complete confidence in Netanyahu’s ability to advance the government’s agenda, and that in his opinion, no one else is capable of obtaining a measure of agreement with the opposition on this issue.