Thousands of demonstrators were camped outside Israel’s Parliament on Sunday as lawmakers debated a key part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to overhaul the judiciary, a proposal that has set off perhaps the country’s gravest domestic crisis since its founding 75 years ago.

Talks were continuing to seek an 11th-hour compromise over the bill, which aims to limit the ways in which the Supreme Court can overturn government decisions. But the months-long dispute over the judicial overhaul has become a stand-in for deeper rifts in Israeli society between those who want a more secular and pluralist state and those with a more religious and nationalist vision.

For now, lawmakers are expected to hold a binding vote on one part of the plan on Monday in Parliament, where Netanyahu’s far-right and religiously conservative ruling coalition holds a four-seat majority.

Adding to the turmoil, Netanyahu was rushed to the hospital early on Sunday for an emergency procedure to implant a heart pacemaker. The Prime Minister was doing “very well,” his doctors said afterwards.

Netanyahu later released a video, saying he’s feeling well after undergoing a procedure this morning to implant a pacemaker. He said he will be back in Parliament by Monday morning. “We are continuing our efforts to finish” passing the changes, he said, “and to do so by consensus.”

To its critics, the Supreme Court is seen as the last bastion of the secular, centrist elite, descended from European Jewry that dominated the state during its earliest decades. Religious Jews, particularly the ultra-Orthodox, perceive the court as an obstacle to their ultraconservative way of life.

The court has often opposed certain privileges and financial subsidies for the ultra-Orthodox. In particular, the court rejected a special dispensation that allowed ultra-Orthodox Jews to postpone military service in favour of religious study, infuriating religious leaders.

Right-wing Israelis who want to entrench Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank also see the court as an antagonist.

Though the court has not obstructed most settlement in the territory, it has blocked some of the settler movement’s most ambitious goals — including the construction of Israeli towns on privately owned Palestinian land.

After mass protests in March, Israel’s far-right and religiously conservative governing coalition suspended its broader plans to overhaul the judiciary, which seek to allow Parliament to overturn Supreme Court decisions and give the government more control over the selection of judges.

For the time being, the coalition is only proceeding with legislation that would limit the court’s use of the subjective legal concept of “reasonableness” to countermand decisions by lawmakers and ministers.

Reasonableness is a legal standard used by many judicial systems. A decision is deemed unreasonable if a court rules that it was made without considering all relevant factors or without giving relevant weight to each factor, or by giving irrelevant factors too much weight.

The government and its backers say that reasonableness is too vague a concept.

Netanyahu has argued that the legislation would be a modest limit on the ways in which an elected government can be stymied by unelected judges, who will in any case still have other tools to overrule ministers.

“Israel will continue to be a democratic state,” he said in a speech last week. “It will continue to be a liberal state.”

Opponents of the government’s proposal view the legal concept of reasonableness as a crucial protection against government overreach, and a key pillar of Israeli democracy. In particular, they fear that the current government — an alliance of ultraconservatives and ultranationalists — might use reduced judicial oversight to help mould a more religious and less pluralist society, principally by awarding jobs and funds to pet projects and allies, and firing officials who oppose them.

“This is about whether the resources of the state will actually be used for the public interest,” said Amichai Cohen, a legal expert at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based research group. “Will the ministers interpret this elimination of reasonableness as carte blanche to just use the resources at their disposal, as they see fit, for political reasons?”

NYTNS and Reuters