of Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced in a televised speech on Monday that he would postpone the judicial reform that has caused many Israelis to fear for their country’s democracy and hundreds of thousands of people to demonstrate in the streets.

However, according to the Israeli media, postponing the consideration of the reform is just a waste of time and a political move related to another project that is attracting criticism and an alleged cow trade with the extreme right.

Netanyahu has reportedly promised the far-right politician, the Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvirille, the establishment of the National Guard. The guard is thought to further increase Ben-Gvir’s power.

The Times of Israel -lehden by Netanyahu did not mention the National Guard in his speech on Monday, but Ben-Gvir said Netanyahu had given him a written promise to establish the Guard. Ben-Gvir released a letter saying that the Guard will be discussed at next Sunday’s cabinet meeting.

Ben-Gvirin has reportedly threatened to leave the government if Netanyahu bows to pressure from protesters and backs down on reforms that would have narrowed the Supreme Court’s role as a reviewer of Israeli laws.

However, Netanyahu convinced the New Right party led by Ben-Gvir to remain in the government with a slim majority with his promise to establish the Guard. The liberal US news site Common Dreams by the promotion of legal reform will be postponed to April or the beginning of May.

”[Oikeuslaitoksen] the reform will go through. The National Guard is established. The budget I requested from the Ministry of National Security will go through in its entirety. Nobody scares us,” Ben-Gvir said, according to the Times of Israel.

By intimidation, he was apparently referring to the protests that had been going on for weeks.

Haaretz deputy editor-in-chief Noah Landau stated in his Twitter messagethat the agreement between Netanyahu and the far-right minister on the National Guard is dangerous.

“The situation is only getting worse. Ben-Gvir’s own armed forces. This was missing,” Landau wrote.

Because the national guard is still being discussed, the structure and operational concept of the new security body are not yet known in detail. Israeli security-focused senior researcher at the INSS think tank More Elran told last July in his analysisthat in his opinion the guard would be a very necessary addition to the security of Israelis.

In Elran’s opinion, the guard could resemble the gendarmerie of different countries or the US National Guard in terms of its operations and composition, and it should be able to react to all kinds of crises, whether they are man-made or natural.

According to him, for example, the violence seen in May 2021 between Jews and Palestinians has underlined the need to strengthen the security forces.

Not everyone agrees. Israel’s former police chief Moshe Karadi for example, stated, according to the Times of Israel, that in Ben-Gvir’s hands the National Guard would become a pawnshop serving the interests of the extremist Jews living in the settlements. According to him, the project would “turn Israel into a dictatorship”.

The civil rights organization ACRI warned in his Twitter threadthat the new guard would practically become Minister Ben-Gvir’s paramilitary militia group, whose activities would focus on areas jointly inhabited by Palestinians and Jews and would be directed mostly against Palestinians.

According to the organization, the guard would absolutely certainly be used to trample on Palestinian rights, and in addition, the guard could act to defeat demonstrations critical of the government.

“This is a new and dangerous addition to the coup we are witnessing. As if it wasn’t enough to take action against the justice system – now we see operational steps to reduce police powers and give them to Ben-Gvir’s Revolutionary Guards,” ACRI tweeted.

The By the Jerusalem correspondent of the New York Times by Patrick Kingsley according to the analysis Netanyahu is at the mercy of far-right politicians as he tries to keep his right-wing government together.

While in his previous government coalitions, Netanyahu may have seemed like a centrist force balancing different sides, now he is, despite his very right-wing worldview, a representative of the “extreme left” of his government, Kingsley stated.

Netanyahu’s government has been characterized as the most right-wing and most religious formation in Israel’s history. The parties have a total of 64 MPs in the 120-member Knesset parliament.

Netanyahu is already the sixth time as Prime Minister of Israel (first time 1996–1999). Six parties sit in the current government formed at the end of last year.

Netanyahu announced on Sunday that he would fire the defense minister Yoav Gallantin, who had criticized the legal reform in his TV speech a day earlier. According to Gallant, the reform has endangered Israel’s social peace.

Former Prime Minister of Israel Naphtali Bennett stated on Sundaythat Israel is in the greatest danger since the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

Israel has been in varying degrees of political chaos for years. Netanyahu’s government came to power after the elections held at the beginning of last November. It was the fifth election in four years.

Demonstrations against the judicial reform began in early January. The protests have grown little by little to hundreds of thousands of people, the largest in Israel’s independent history.

The situation is complicated by the fact that a corruption trial is underway against Prime Minister Netanyahu. Netanyahu has denied, among other things, that he was guilty of accepting bribes and accused the case of a political witch hunt by his left-wing opponents.

One of Netanyahu’s lawyers, Ben Zeraccording to news reported on Monday, has threatened to drop his defense of Netanyahu unless the prime minister backs down on his judicial reform, The Jerusalem Post newspaper reported.

Netanyahu has been accused of attacking the judiciary precisely so that he could avoid the charges against himself. Netanyahu has also denied this accusation.