A new wave of mass demonstrations against a government plan to limit judicial independence swept across Israel on Thursday, with protesters restricting road access to the country’s main airport hours before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to fly to Italy later in the day.
Thousands of demonstrators, some of them in a convoy of tractors, disrupted traffic in several cities, and others sailed a flotilla of boats through a maritime shipping lane near a major port.
By late morning, at least 25 protesters had been detained or arrested, according to Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster. Some demonstrators parked their cars on an access road to Ben-Gurion International Airport, near Tel Aviv, slowing the entry of passengers and prompting the police to warn that the cars would be towed.
The disruption coincided with a visit to the country by Lloyd J. Austin III, the United States secretary of defense, who is visiting the Middle East, and it prompted Israeli officials to move meetings between him, Mr. Netanyahu, and Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, to the airport to allow the participants to enter and exit the site by helicopter.
Mr. Austin was in Israel to talk with Israeli officials about the need to calm tensions in the occupied West Bank, which has experienced a particularly violent start to the year, as well as to discuss efforts to restrict Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.
The protests have taken place in cities across the country for weeks in response to widespread public anger over the government’s contentious proposal to reduce the influence of the judiciary. The issue has divided Israeli society, led to fears for the future of the country’s democracy and prompted warnings of political violence and even civil war.
The far-right government wants to allow Parliament to override Supreme Court decisions, restrict the court’s ability to block laws passed by Parliament and give the government control over the committee that appoints new judges.
Opponents argue that these moves would lead to authoritarian rule by a majority that would limit minority rights. Lawmakers who are part of the governing coalition say that Israel cannot be a true democracy without giving elected lawmakers primacy over unelected judges.
The standoff is one of the most serious domestic crises since Israel’s founding in 1948, raising fears that it might damage the economy, particularly the country’s high-tech sector, and has caused unrest in the military.
But despite the toxic and dramatic discourse, there are signs that a compromise might be possible. Academics, business leaders and legal experts have met in recent days with the government lawmakers leading the overhaul, presenting several different plans that could lead to a middle ground acceptable to both the government and its opponents.
On Wednesday, a top civil servant, Yossi Fuchs, suggested that one of those plans — proposed by a leading law professor, a former justice minister and a former general — could be the “basis for negotiation.”
But Mr. Fuchs, the cabinet secretary, said the proposal would not “not be accepted ‘as is,’” adding that there were still big differences between the sides. Separately, opposition leaders dismissed it as too similar to the government’s initial proposal.
The plan would have made it slightly harder for Parliament to override the court’s decisions and given the government marginally less control over the appointment of new judges.
Also on Thursday, three Palestinian gunmen were killed in a shootout with Israeli soldiers in a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where rising violence by Palestinian armed groups, raids by Israeli soldiers and attacks on Palestinians by extremist Israeli settlers has led to one of the most combustible situations in the territory in years.
Palestinian officials have described the first two months of the year, in which more than 60 Palestinians were killed, mostly in gun battles with Israeli soldiers, as the deadliest for West Bank Palestinians since 2000.
The Israeli military said in a statement that the slain men were accused of shooting attacks in the northern West Bank, and that two were members of Islamic Jihad, a major armed group based in the Gaza Strip.
A spokesman for Islamic Jihad told Palestinian news media the group was preparing to respond, without specifying how or when, but raising the possibility that the group would fire rockets from the Gaza Strip overnight. Armed groups in Gaza often respond with rocket fire to violence in the West Bank, and every few years these exchanges have led to a full-scale air war.
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