There is wide UK media coverage of yesterday’s protests, with Reuters and The Daily Telegraph both reporting the vast scale of demonstrations. “If the protests escalate,” writes The Guardian, “Netanyahu may be forced once again to push the legislation until after the summer recess, a decision that would anger his coalition partners.”

The BBC notes that: “Significantly, hundreds of reservists – the backbone of Israel’s military – have threatened to stop turning up for duty in protest at the reforms… The military’s chief of staff has said reservists do not have the right to refuse to show up, and the military has said it will act against anyone who follows through on their threats.”

The Times’ Anshel Pfeffer writes: “The protests began around 6am when hundreds of pro-democracy activists, many of them belonging to a group of reserve officers in the Israeli army, set up a makeshift tent camp on the main coastal motorway north of Tel Aviv. They hung a banner on a bridge spanning the road reading: ‘No Entrance to Dictatorship.’ Other groups began simultaneously to block motorways leading to Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa as police moved in with water cannon and began arresting demonstrators… One of the protests took place outside the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, where protesters blocked the main road leading to the prime minister’s office and were pushed back by mounted police.”

Away from the judicial reforms and protests, Reuters covers remarks made yesterday by UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories Francesca Albanese. “By deeming all Palestinians as a potential security threat,” she said, “Israel is blurring the line between its own security and the security of its annexation plan… Palestinians are presumed guilty without evidence, arrested without warrants, detained without charge or trial very often, and brutalised in Israeli custody.” In response, Israel’s permanent mission to the UN in Geneva said: “Israel does not expect any fair, objective or professional treatment from this Special Rapporteur who was chosen due to her partial views against Israel… Her mandate was created with the sole purpose of discriminating against Israel and Israelis.”

The Israeli media is dominated by reporting and analysis on yesterday’s protests in response to the passage of the reasonableness bill. Yediot Ahronot’s Nahum Barnea says that “the protestors and the coalition are two trains that are barrelling towards one another. There isn’t a political mechanism in place that might stop them, certainly not at this stage. Only a dramatic and fateful development might possibly reshuffle the deck.” His colleague Lior Ben Ami, meanwhile, writes: “Look at our country. At the land that was given to us for safekeeping. Look at the junctions. The intersections. The highway off-ramps. At the entrance to Ben Gurion Airport… The heart cries for… this country. It also understands: We have leaders who have led to having a divided nation. To a divided people. To rolling heads. You’d better look for reasonableness somewhere else, if you insist. It was a long day, in terms of the number of hours and minutes. A sad day on which every second was painted with a clash somewhere. A day on which democracy laid down and fought and blocked roads got soaked by water cannons and was dragged away.”

Maariv’s Ephraim Ganor writes: “Those who seek to abolish management supervision of government officials are inviting a corrupt government. This is the reason why so many good citizens, for whom the good of the country and its future are important, take to the streets en masse, at the expense of their work, their livelihood, their free time and their families. Good citizens who risk their lives to prevent the demolition of the dam, which will lead to the collapse of the country. Citizens, the vast majority of whom served in the IDF, in combat and elite units, some of whom fought in several wars and military operations for the security of the country, and today they have to deal with the decisions and whims of an illusory government, the vast majority of which did not serve in the IDF.”

Calling for an immediate return to compromise negotiations, Ynet’s Ben Dror Yemini writes that “Those in power bare the greater responsibility… Israeli leaders have forgotten that democracy is more than majority rule, while protesters forget that at times, that is exactly what democracy means. But Israel’s predicament is more complicated than initially believed because the coalition is not presenting right-wing arguments. They repeat claims long made by legal experts in the past decades, who warned of an overactive judiciary and power-hungry law enforcement. But they replace the ills of the judicial system with greater ills and abuses of power… That is why the protest is just, more than at any time in Israel’s history.”

In contrast, Israel Hayom’s Ariel Kahana writes, in opposition to the protests: “This isn’t what a protest looks like. This is what rampaging and raving looks like. In a democratic country every individual has the right to protest of course, and every citizen will continue to have that right even if the judicial reform is passed in full. But what cannot be tolerated in a democratic country is to have the only airport that connects it to the world paralysed; to have people abandon their military posts; to have extremists try to intimidate the political leadership; to have roads blocked to ambulances and other emergency vehicles; and to have main traffic arteries blocked to traffic creating an ongoing and disproportionate disruption to the lives of millions of citizens. Those methods were unacceptable back when the judicial reform was first unveiled last winter. Now that nearly nothing is left of the original reform, and now that it is clear that all the talk about ‘dictatorship’ is baseless, those terrible disruptions to normal life are all the more unacceptable.”

Away from the protests and legislation, Ynet reports that amid public tensions between the coalition and the Biden Administration, Amos Hochstein, a special envoy of the US President, arrived secretly in Israel on Tuesday and met with Netanyahu and National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi. The meeting is said to have included discussion of a potential normalisation deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, as well as tensions between Israel and Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border. “According to reports in the Arab media,” says Ynet, “a deal is taking shape between Israel and Hezbollah that would see the dismantling of the second tent, in exchange for stopping the construction of a new border fence in the Alawite village of Ghajar on the slopes of the Golan.”

As Haaretz reports the killing of a 30-year-old Arab Israeli in the northern Israel town of Kafr Qara on Wednesday, there is also coverage of Netanyahu yesterday holding a meeting of the Ministerial Committee on Arab Sector Affairs. Following an increase in internal criminal violence within the Arab Israeli community, the committee decided to form a sub-committee, to be chaired by Netanyahu and tasked with fighting the crime wave. The sub-committee will also address Arab Israeli economic advancement and social integration. Netanyahu promised to “reduce these gaps for the benefit of Israel’s Arab citizens. They deserve it and we must deal with all of these issues.”

Channel 12 reports that Mahmoud Abbas is expected to make a rare visit to the city of Jenin today. It will be the Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman’s first visit since 2012 to a city which recently saw Israel’s anti-terror Operation House and Garden and which has become a hotbed of Palestinian terror largely free of PA control. Arriving in a Jordanian helicopter at 12:30 this afternoon and accompanied by PLO Executive Committee Secretary General Hussein al-Sheikh, Abbas will be received in an official ceremony at the muqataa in Jenin and will then meet with representatives of public and civilian organizations in the city and in the refugee camp, according to plans.