Justice minister moves to tackle protesters as Binyamin Netanyahu warns of an international campaign to ‘blacken’ Israel’s name

Protesters who throw stones at moving vehicles could be jailed for up to 10 years following the approval on Sunday of a bill by an Israeli ministerial legal committee.



The bill, which faces a series of parliament readings before coming into effect, would amend an existing law that allows stone throwers to be jailed for 20 years, but only if it can be proven they intended to inflict harm.

The new version would enable 10 years imprisonment for “throwing stones or other objects at travelling vehicles in a manner that could endanger the passenger’s safety” or harm the vehicle, the bill read.

The justice minister, Ayelet Shaked, of the far-right Jewish Home party, who presented the bill and heads the ministerial committee for legislation that approved it, noted that stone throwers were receiving “very soft punishments compared to their crimes”, because intent was difficult to prove.

“The amendment to the law effectively places the responsibility on the stone thrower and not the prosecutor,” she wrote on her Facebook page. “Anyone who throws stones at cars or people has to assume someone will get hurt.”

Palestinians target Israeli cars on West Bank roads with stones almost every day, and clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police in the West Bank and east Jerusalem tend to involve stone throwing.

The legislative move came as the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, said Israel faced an “international campaign to blacken its name” aimed at delegitimising its very existence.

The international community disproportionally singled it for condemnation while remaining silent on major conflicts and human rights abuses in other countries, he said.

Netanyahu made the comments on Sunday at a meeting of his new cabinet just two days after a Palestinian proposal to suspend Israel from world football was dropped at the last moment. Netanyahu warned that such efforts to boycott Israel continued. Palestinians accelerated their campaign to boycott Israel and Israeli-made products after peace talks collapsed in 2014.

“We are in the midst of a great struggle being waged against the state of Israel, an international campaign to blacken its name. It is not connected to our actions; it is connected to our very existence. It does not matter what we do; it matters what we symbolise and what we are,” Netanyahu said.

“I think that it is important to understand that these things do not stem from the fact that if only we were nicer or a little more generous – we are very generous, we have made many offers, we have made many concessions – that anything would change because this campaign to delegitimise Israel entails something much deeper that is being directed at us and seeks to deny our very right to live here,” he said.

Agence France-Presse and AP contributed to this report