From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Taverny-C, and this is The Daily.

For weeks in Israel, the far-right government of Benjamin Netanyahu has been pushing a highly

controversial plan to fundamentally change the country's Supreme Court.

It led to some of the largest protests in Israel's history.

On Monday, Netanyahu announced he was pausing it.

Today, Jerusalem Bureau Chief Patrick Kingsley explains Netanyahu's surprising concession.

It's Wednesday, March 29th.

Patrick, when we last spoke, it really looked like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

was pressing ahead with this very polarizing plan to change the country's Supreme Court.

On Monday, we find out he's press pause.

So how did we reach this point?

Just 17 days later, that Netanyahu has started to back down.

We reached this point because the government set itself the arbitrary deadline of this week,

this week is the last week of the winter session of the Israeli Parliament.

They wanted to get at least part of their judicial overhaul onto the law books by the end of that session.

The goal of the overhaul was to limit the power of the Supreme Court, limit the influence of the judiciary

on the selection of new judges, and to give the government more power over who gets to be a judge on the Supreme Court.

Which of course would be an enormous historic change in Israel.

Yes, it would be a big change.

The Supreme Court is one of the few checks on the government's power.

And since the current government is the most right-wing government in Israeli history,

there are fears among the centrist and left-wing opposition that removing the court's restrictions on government

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