Hours after Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that he intends to renew the judicial reform legislation, the chair of the Constitutional Committee, MK Simcha Rothman, arrived this evening (Sunday) for the Book Week event at the Sarona complex in Tel Aviv – a short distance from the center of the anti-government protests on Kaplan Street.
Anti-government protesters arrived in the area and confronted the police, who dispersed them by force.
Earlier, the author Dr. Gadi Taub told why he would come to support MK Rothman in the Sarona complex. “I came to demonstrate against bullying. As soon as I heard that MK Rotman was going to be bullied and threatened, I said that we must not stand by. This protest is not intended to express an opinion. It is designed to harass and embitter the lives of elected officials in order to put pressure on them, and it is sheltered under the shadow of a supportive journalistic umbrella.”

According to him, “Even the protest against Netanyahu, which became a soundtrack of chants designed to harass the prime minister around the clock, should not be covered under the democratic right to demonstrate. This is not a legitimate thing. We as a country do not want elected officials who cannot concentrate on their work because of such harassment.”
Regarding the manifestations of violence in the protests, Taub said: “You see the bluff behind the claim that it is a ‘democratic right to demonstrate’ when they try to physically attack the ministers. The writing is on the wall. This is going to a bad place. These people are more and more imposing, and they are becoming more and more like a cult, like the Bolsheviks who wish to carry out a coup. We need to put a limit on this. If the authorities do not put a limit on it, private people like you and me should stand up to defend democracy from these thugs who claim democratic values but, in practice, try to reverse the results of democratic elections by chaos and instilling fear. That’s why I’m coming tonight to Sarona.”
“By the way, this is also true on the left. It is not legitimate, neither on the left nor on the right, to demonstrate just to harass. It is legitimate to demonstrate near a politician’s house once, twice, three times, but that does not include the right to make his life miserable,” he points out.