The Times’ Anshel Pfeffer reports from within the improvised protesters camp at Jerusalem’s Sacher Park. “On Saturday, the first night of the march,” he writes, “groups of Bibistim, diehard supporters of Netanyahu, had arrived at the park with blaring loudspeakers and firecrackers. Sleep had been impossible until 3am when the police arrived to restore order. ‘There really wasn’t much to talk about with the Bibistim,’ says Omer Vulkan, a marketing executive from Kibbutz Mishmar Ha’Negev in the Negev desert. ‘But there were much more meaningful conversations with young Haredim [ultra-Orthodox Jews] where, despite the disagreements, there was also serious discussion,’ Vulkan said. ‘I am here for my two grandsons, so they can grow up in a free Israel. I fought as a paratrooper in Lebanon, but this is something much more important. This is a war we have no choice but to fight for a future here.’

In The Financial Times, popular author Yuval Noah Harari writes an op-ed entitled ‘Israeli democracy is fighting for its life’. Of the reservist protests, he says: “To appreciate the magnitude of this step, it should be recalled that military service is a sacred duty for many Israelis. In a country that emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust, and that has faced existential threats for decades, the army has always been off-limits in political controversies. This is no longer the case. Former chiefs of the Israeli army, air force and security services have publicly called on soldiers to stop serving. Veterans of Israel’s many wars are saying this is the most important struggle of their lives. The Netanyahu government tries to depict this as a military coup, but it is the exact opposite. Israeli soldiers aren’t taking up arms to oppose the government — they are laying them down. They explain that their contract is with the Israeli democracy, and once democracy expires — so does their contract.”

The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Independent, and The BBC cover both Netanyahu’s medical procedure on Saturday night and the weekend’s anti-reform protests. The latter quotes the letter to Netanyahu signed by three former army chiefs of staff and dozens of senior Israeli security officials calling on the prime minister to scrap the reforms. “This legislation,” it says, “is destroying the common foundations of Israeli society, ripping the people apart, dismantling the army and inflicting fatal harm to Israel’s security.” It then quotes Eyal Nave, one of the leaders of Brothers in Arms protest group representing military reservists. “We’ve tried everything,” Nave says; “this is where we draw the line. We pledged to serve the kingdom and not the king,” Appealing directly to Mr Netanyahu, he said: “You and only you are responsible for what is happening here. We had faith in the government but the government broke us. I will not volunteer to serve in a dictatorial state.”

The BBC offers a primer, ‘Israel judicial reform: Why is the country in turmoil?’, including a brief guide to all four elements of Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s original programme for judicial reform.

The Guardian covers remarks from US President Joe Biden over the weekend. Of the judicial reform agenda, he said: “Given the range of threats and challenges confronting Israel right now, it doesn’t make sense for Israeli leaders to rush this — the focus should be on pulling people together and finding consensus.”

The Guardian runs a feature on changing US attitudes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “A Gallup survey earlier this year,” it says, “found that for the first time more Democrats were sympathetic to the Palestinians than the Israelis by a margin of 11%, a significant shift from a decade ago. In 2021, a Jewish Electorate Institute poll found that 58% of American Jewish voters support restrictions on US military aid to prevent Israel using it to expand West Bank settlements. One-third agreed that ‘Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is similar to racism in the United States’ and one-quarter said that ‘Israel is an apartheid state’, numbers that shocked some Jewish community leaders.”

The Israeli media is dominated by today’s vote on reasonability, and by the weekend protests’ illustration of the division in Israeli society wrought by the judicial reform programme.

In Maariv, Ben Caspit writes: “If there is one person who might be able to square the magic circle that Israel is caught in, it’s Herzog. The problem is that Netanyahu has already cheated Herzog before. He held secret negotiations with Herzog over the course of an entire year and a half about Herzog [who was Labour Party chairman at the time] joining his government. The Saudis, the Egyptians, the Americans and the British were all included in the negotiations… They had a plan to call an international conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, to renew the peace process and much more. But at the very last second, right on the verge of the finishing line, Netanyahu pulled a sharp U-turn and brought Avigdor Liberman into his government instead of Herzog… The other side isn’t in much better shape. Lapid and Gantz have no control over the protests (and, by the way, neither does Ehud Barak). They can agree to whatever they want with Netanyahu, but they can’t guarantee that that will reassure the huge number of Israelis who have been fighting for democracy for the past seven months… The question is what is the ‘Likud’ in 2023? It long ago stopped being the national-liberal party that was run by Begin and Shamir. Nowadays, the Likud is a mutation of the Netanyahu family, Kahana Hai, extremist hilltop rabbis, rotten political operators and a flourishing industry of political appointments. That is sad.”

Yediot Ahronot’s Sima Kadmon focusses on the damage done to Israeli unity. “The scenes from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem last night were tough to watch,” he writes. “A split screen, to the right supporters of the reform, on the left opponents of it. How symbolic. We’re a divided nation; last night part was on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv, part on Kaplan Street in Jerusalem. Hundreds of thousands of people facing off, these guys vs. those guys. These guys against those guys. And no, we are not brothers. We are in the midst of a civil war. We are wounded, bleeding, sad, worried. The future is uncertain. The fantastic energy of supporters of the protest during their journey to the Knesset, the excitement, the passion and the feeling of euphoria of people who feel they are fighting for their homes, the feeling of togetherness that has worked for so many weeks and which reached a high point over the past week—could turn into ill feelings if the legislation is passed. The vestige of confidence, if there ever was any, has been completely shattered. ‘Solidarity,’ that absurd word that people still speak about as if it had ever been a living, sustainable being, has come apart like a spider’s web.”

In the name of national security, Meir Ben Shabbat, in Israel Hayom, calls for compromise. “‘Earthquake in the Israeli Army of Occupation’s air force’ – this is the headline that the Lebanese news outlet Al Mayadeen gave to the worrying development of IAF pilots refusing to serve. Our enemies are gazing at us in wonder and rubbing their hands in glee. This crisis fills them with hope, as they see Israel torn apart by internal strife, continuing to rip itself up into pieces… If we insist on focusing our attention on the question of who is to blame and who is right – we will not succeed in extricating ourselves from the quicksand that threatens to pull us further down. Instead of going out to prove that we are right, now is the time to display responsibility: for the security and resilience of the state and to ensure that society remains intact. Above all we need to remove the IDF, the defence establishment, and the health system from all disputes.”

Haaretz’s editorial makes a last-minute appeal to the coalition MKs. “The legal upheaval, which is being spearheaded by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” it writes, “exploits the democratic system in order to dismantle it. This government is an elected one that rests on a parliamentary majority obtained through free and legal elections. But this majority seeks to abuse its power to change the rules of the game and damage the structure of Israel’s system of government. Consequently, in contrast to the right’s lies and demagoguery, this is an anti-democratic measure… this editorial is a direct appeal to each and every coalition member: You have the power to stop this madness. You have the ability to prevent disaster. Don’t lend a hand to damaging the structure of our system of government. Don’t be minor cogs in a fanatic program that seeks to destroy everything that was built here through so much shared effort.”

Israel Hayom reports the reaction of the Iranian regime to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s medical procedure on Saturday night. Spokesperson for the Iranian Foreign Ministry Nasser Kanaani said, “The media are reporting that doctors used a pacemaker on the heart of the prime minister of the Zionist occupation regime, but it is clear that the crisis in the heart of the Zionist regime is deeper than the crisis in the heart of its prime minister.”