About 1,000 Israeli artists, writers and academics have written to the ambassadors of Germany and Britain calling for Netanyahu’s upcoming visits to their countries to be canceled because of his government’s controversial judicial reform.

“The State of Israel is currently facing a dire crisis, the most extreme in its history, an accelerating dangerous process led by its elected government to transform it from a thriving democracy into a theocratic dictatorship,” the letter said.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on the letter. Among the signatories are writer David Grossman and sculptor Sigalit Landau.

Netanyahu is scheduled to begin a three-day visit to Germany today, and reports said the Israeli prime minister plans to visit London in the second half of March.

Berlin police today announced increased security measures for the visit of the Israeli prime minister.

“We ask Germany and Britain to quickly inform the accused Netanyahu that his planned state visits to your countries are cancelled. If these visits go ahead as planned, a black shadow will hang over them,” the authors of the letter said.

Netanyahu faces criminal charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, the letter’s authors noted, and critics believe the judicial reforms are an attempt by him to evade justice.

“The trials are ongoing and underway. To escape justice, Netanyahu conspired against the State of Israel with anti-Zionist, fundamentalist and messianic entities and with convicted Jewish terrorists, who jointly promote racist, homophobic and anti-democratic agendas targeting all Israelis, both at home and abroad. abroad”.

They noted that Netanyahu returned to Israel on Monday from a state visit to Italy, accompanied by his wife, a visit that was supposed to be short but was not and paid for by the Israeli taxpayer.

The cultural and academic figures who signed the letter stressed that Netanyahu wants to turn the Israeli police into “political police, a tool that every dictatorship needs to impose state power on citizens.”

At the same time, they emphasized that the reforms “will seriously damage civil rights in Israel, including the right to literary and artistic freedom of speech, and will lead to the abolition of the freedom of writers and artists in Israel.”

The authors of the letter noted that both Germany and Britain have supported Israel as a democratic homeland for Jews – and therefore Israel needs their support “more than ever”.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing and far-right coalition government that has ruled Israel since December has introduced justice reforms that give the government greater powers to select judges and limit the powers of the Supreme Court.

Critics consider this to be a threat to the separation of powers and, in general, to the democratic nature of the country.

Over the past ten weeks the country has been experiencing a historic wave of protests with hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets in many cities against judicial reform being pushed by the right-wing/far-right Netanyahu government.

In fact, during Netanyahu’s departure for Rome last week, the Israeli prime minister had to be flown by helicopter to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, as protesters had cordoned off the area around the airport.