Eisenkot bloc plans Knesset speaker vote and repeal of judicial overhaul laws

The parliamentary bloc led by Gadi Eisenkot is preparing to use its new majority in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, to begin rolling back the judicial overhaul legislation passed by the outgoing government and to install a new Knesset speaker, Haaretz reported. According to the newspaper, both steps are planned for the coming week.

The moves are taking place before any new government has been formed. Haaretz reported that talks on assembling a governing coalition are still under way, which means the bloc is acting through its control of the parliamentary floor rather than through cabinet ministries.

What the bills are said to contain

Haaretz's report, most of which sits behind a paywall, does not list the individual bills in its publicly available text. A more detailed list came from Moshe Feiglin, a right-wing politician who opposes the measures. In a Hebrew-language post on X, Feiglin wrote that a package of bills submitted to the 26th Knesset this week would cancel all of the judicial reform laws, reverse what he called the media reform, and repeal the so-called incapacity law. He also wrote that the package would cap how long a prime minister can serve and bar a prime minister from holding office while under indictment.

Feiglin's description of the package has not been confirmed in the portion of the Haaretz report available to the public, and it should be read as his own account. He characterised the bills as an attack by the left on the Jewish identity and sovereignty of the state, and wrote that their purpose was to protect what he called the left-wing elite and the deep state and to end the political career of Benjamin Netanyahu. Those are his political claims, not established facts.

In a second post, Feiglin framed the current dispute in the Knesset as more than an ordinary political argument. He wrote that it reflected an internal struggle over national identity, arguing that efforts to replace a Jewish identity with a civic "Israeli" one had handed Arab citizens a decisive role in sustaining that civic identity.

The Knesset and its speaker

The Knesset is Israel's single-chamber legislature. Its speaker chairs sessions of the full house and has significant influence over the parliamentary agenda, including which bills come up for debate and when. Electing a speaker is one of the first items of business for a newly sworn-in parliament, and a bloc that controls a majority can choose a speaker from its own ranks even before a government is in place. That is why the speakership vote matters to the Eisenkot bloc's legislative plans.

What the judicial overhaul was

The "judicial overhaul" refers to a programme of legislation advanced by Netanyahu's government that sought to change the balance of power between the elected branches and the courts. Supporters described it as a necessary reform to curb what they saw as an overreaching judiciary. Opponents, who in Israel often call it a judicial coup, said it weakened the independence of the courts and the checks on government power. The programme triggered one of the deepest political divisions in the country's recent history.

The incapacity law that Feiglin named is generally understood to refer to legislation narrowing the circumstances in which a sitting prime minister can be declared unfit to serve. Critics argued it was designed to shield Netanyahu, who faces criminal charges, from being removed on those grounds. A ban on a prime minister serving under indictment, also named in Feiglin's list, would bear directly on Netanyahu's position for the same reason.

How this fits the current political moment

Haaretz described Eisenkot's bloc as having newly secured a Knesset majority, and it referred to the Netanyahu-led cabinet as the outgoing government. A bloc that controls the parliament but has not yet formed a government can still pass legislation, since lawmaking is a function of the Knesset rather than the cabinet. Repealing laws, however, requires bills to pass through several readings, so the steps described for the coming week would mark the start of that process rather than its completion.

What the reports do not say

The available reports do not name the candidate the bloc intends to back for speaker, and they do not give a timetable for the readings each repeal bill would need. No response from Netanyahu or his Likud party to the planned repeals has been reported. The precise contents of the bill package rest, in the material available, on Feiglin's account alone.