Children start school late to protest judicial reform, but not sure what it means

One youngster at special protest organized for families with children needed prompting from a reporter in order to say why she was there.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Parents in dozens of locations across the country, from north to south, participated in an anti-judicial reform demonstration Monday involving their primary- and high-school-aged children instead of getting them to school for their first hour of class.

The theme of the 8 a.m. protest was, “There is no education without democracy,” which was written on hundreds of signs and chanted repeatedly by the demonstrators.

One child, who looked to be about nine years old, was interviewed by a Ynet reporter. When asked why he was there, the boy replied, “to demonstrate against the coup d’etat.”

The reporter then asked, “What are you afraid of?”

The child answered, “That there will be no rights.”

The reporter continued questioning the child, saying “What, no rights in the country?” to which he replied, “It’s becoming a dictatorship.”

Journalist-turned-politician Yinon Magal posted to his Twitter feed that a Channel 13 reporter fed answers to an even younger child, who was asked why she came, and she didn’t know what to say.

“Did you come to school or to protest?” the reporter prompted.

She answered, “To protest,” but then didn’t know what to reply when asked, “To protest for what?”

The reporter could be seen and heard whispering into her ear, “Democracy,” which the child duly repeated into the microphone.

In contravention of the law, the families also obstructed many roads in the cities as well as major highways, creating major traffic jams.

In Tel Aviv, the parents and children blocked main streets as they marched on two different routes to converge on the major Namir-Rokach junction. At the crowded Sira interchange on Route 2 outside of the suburb of Herzliya, and further on near the exit to Ra’anana, dozens blocked the highway temporarily as well.

In one video clip of demonstrators sitting down on a large highway, one person can be heard sing-songing into a loudspeaker, “Democracy is crossing.”

No arrests were reported at any of the sites.