The legal battle surrounding Saturday night’s anti-war protests centered on who sets the conditions under which demonstrations may go forward during wartime, how late those decisions can be made, and whether emergency restrictions are being enforced evenly or mainly against political dissent.
The High Court’s intervention was narrower than some of the public reaction suggested, but it still carried broader implications.
The justices did not declare that mass protests must be allowed regardless of wartime constraints. But they did make clear that freedom of expression and protest do not disappear in war, and that restrictions on those rights remain subject to scrutiny.
The petition was filed by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and activist Itamar Greenberg, after a series of recent incidents in which police dispersed anti-war protests on the grounds that Home Front Command gathering restrictions barred them.
At an unusually expedited Friday hearing, held during the Passover recess, the High Court noted that the state had not filed a written response, despite being given the opportunity to do so.
The justices then recorded the state’s undertaking that Home Front Command would inspect the four protest sites at issue and, by Saturday morning, provide the conditions and limitations for holding demonstrations there.
That Friday ruling did not hand the petitioners a sweeping victory or establish a general right to protest free of wartime safety restrictions. Instead, it pushed the police and Home Front Command to produce an actual operating framework, while also noting that the state was examining the broader issue of demonstrations during wartime in light of the importance of political speech and protest “at this time.”
The case quickly evolved beyond one Saturday night’s protests into a broader dispute over how protest rights are to be balanced with wartime restrictions.
The right to protest during wartime
The confrontation sharpened on Saturday. The Home Front Command’s position was that it could not exempt three of the four protest sites from the standing defense policy, and that at Habima Square in Tel Aviv it would allow only a gathering of up to 150 people total. That position rested on operational and rescue considerations, including crowding near protected spaces and concerns that larger gatherings could hinder movement during an alert.
By Saturday afternoon, the justices made it clear that they were not satisfied. In a 4:50 p.m. decision, the court said that, on its face, the Home Front Command decision did not give proper weight to freedom of expression and protest even during wartime.
The judges also stressed that the command’s position had not yet been substantively reviewed by legal officials in or outside the military. They ordered the state to issue a new decision by 6 p.m. that would balance security needs with the right to protest. The same ruling also showed that the court viewed the case as extending beyond the evening’s protests alone: It ordered the state to file an updated notice on its wider policy toward demonstrations during the war, and set a further hearing for April 9.
When no adequate response arrived in time, the court escalated. In its later Saturday decision, issued after the state still had not responded by 7 p.m. and as the protests approached, the High Court granted interim relief and ordered the state to allow demonstrations at all four sites at issue in the petition. It said the gathering limit at each site could be no lower than 150 people, and at Habima Square no lower than 600. The wording mattered: The court did not approve “up to” 600 at Habima; it required a framework allowing no fewer than 600.
The judges then went further. Home Front Command had argued that other gatherings cited by the petitioners were also inconsistent with the defense guidelines but that a lack of enforcement against them did not change the rules themselves. The court responded that the practical meaning of this was that police enforcement of Home Front Command instructions was being carried out against protest demonstrations but not against other places and events. “This situation is difficult to fathom,” the judges wrote.
In that passage, the court identified what it saw as an apparent enforcement disparity between how protest gatherings were being treated and how other public assemblies were being handled.
The procedural handling of the case then became a public fight in its own right. On Sunday, the judiciary’s spokesperson issued an unusual statement defending the judicial branch against what it called “fake news.” According to that statement, the petition had been opened on Wednesday, the Friday hearing was scheduled exceptionally during recess in order to resolve the issue before Shabbat, and the state had not formulated a position before that hearing.
The statement further said that, despite requests from the judicial panel, the police and Home Front Command insisted their position would only be delivered on Saturday after site inspections. It also stressed that the judges declined to hold a live Saturday hearing and that the Saturday decisions were made via telephone consultation among the justices, without bringing court staff into the courthouse.
Police, however, issued a sharp public rebuttal. In a statement, police said that “contrary to what was claimed,” it had in fact presented its position to the High Court before Shabbat, and argued that only Home Front Command – not the police – had been asked to present a proposed framework for the protests.
Police also emphasized that implementing the court’s decision required the deployment of hundreds of officers, “while risking their lives,” and said that doing so required Shabbat desecration.
The public record now reflects two competing narratives: the judiciary’s account of delay and last-minute state action and the police’s insistence that it had already stated its position before Shabbat.
That dispute goes to the heart of the weekend’s legal and public controversy.
The High Court was not purporting to replace the security authorities’ discretion wholesale. Rather, it was confronted with a fast-moving situation in which the operative security framework arrived late, appeared not to give sufficient weight to protest rights, and, in the judges’ view, was being enforced unevenly. The rulings were therefore less about overriding security agencies altogether than about requiring them to act in a timely, reasoned, proportionate and lawful way.
The broader legal point that emerged over the weekend was that the High Court did not say that war strips the Home Front Command of authority or that security concerns must always give way to public protest.
Instead, it signaled that even in wartime, protest remains a protected political expression; restrictions must be justified and proportionate; and their application remains open to judicial review.
The immediate dispute over Saturday night’s demonstrations may have been resolved by the court’s interim orders. But the wider legal question – how police and Home Front Command are to regulate protests during wartime, and whether those restrictions are being applied evenly – remains very much alive.