February 27th, 2024 - 15th Report: Early Protests

 

February 27^th, 2024

Dear family and friends,

Report number 15: Protests, first round

Our next door neighbor Rivka has been waiting for months for her daughter, an intelligence career officer, to give birth. On Sunday morning her first grandchild, a boy, was born. At precisely the same time her youngest brother Moshe, a commando career officer, was critically wounded in Gaza. Given our magnificent medical system, he may eventually be alright. When I was young, we used to hope that new-born boys wouldn’t need to serve in the army. That was before her brother was even born. We’ve stopped.

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We’re almost five months into this ugly war, and we’re not where we thought we’d be.  I ought to write about Israel’s war aims. Whatever they were, the case can now be made that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for personal gain. The polls all agree he’s unpopular. In elections he and his coalition would be trounced. About 75% of voters favor voting soon after the war. So long as the war continues, however, there’s great reluctance to engage in demonstrations and election politics. Ergo, Netanyahu needs the war to continue for as long as possible.

Why we’re allowing this to happen? By October 10^th most pundits thought the war would last a month or three, then millions of us would pour onto the streets to demand elections. It seemed a no-brainer. We had a ready-made protest movement that had just spent nine months battling the government to a standstill, and the post-war fury would surely be greater by an order of magnitude. This may yet come to pass. But so far, it hasn’t. Before I try to understand why, it’s finally time to write about the protest movement we created in 2023.

Netanyahu has dominated Israel’s political scene since the early 1990s, and his style has always been characterized by claiming he’s the only one capable of defending Israel from its external enemies and their internal allies. When Yitzchak Rabin ran the Oslo peace process with the Palestinians, Netanyahu cast him as the destroyer of Zionism and led the protests that ended with his assassination. Unfazed by the effect of his words, in 1996 he campaigned on the slogan that Shimon Peres was a PLO stooge who would divide Jerusalem, while he, Netanyahu, would be “good for the Jews”. It worked, and he’s never changed his technique. In 2019 a 30-year ally abandoned him on a crucial Knesset vote. Netanyahu walked over to a TV camera and declared with a straight face that “Avigdor Lieberman is a Leftie”. The elaborate media ecosystem he’s constructed – we call it The Poison Machine – turned on a dime and poured hatred on Lieberman. It was a scene straight from George Orwell.

Still, in the ensuing twenty years with their political ups and downs, he generally managed to preserve some practical distance between his toxic campaigning and a more moderate governing style. His coalitions generally included a party to his left, leaving him room to maneuver. Sometime around 2014-2015 he changed. Rumors of corruption became official investigations, which became indictments and a drawn-out trial. His politics hardened, as his campaigning style became his governing method. As his grip on his party became total, the moderates and pragmatists were forced out, leaving only corrupt sycophants and messianic racists. (And very few women).

As Netanyahu hardened, so has the opposition. In an intricate dance of action-reaction-counter-reaction we’ve been drawing lines on the most important ideological battlefield since 1948: who are we, the Israelis? What are we about, and what are we trying to do here? Hamas’ attack threw a truck-sized spanner into the dynamics of this conversation, but perhaps only temporarily. So today I’m going to try to describe the reaction to Netanyahu’s shift towards more religion, more chauvinism, and less democracy.

In summer 2016, when the police first interrogated Netanyahu, a handful of individuals started demonstrating. They stood with posters at traffic junctions, alone or in small groups. Among them was retired Brigadier-General Amir Haskel. Soon a larger group began demonstrating every Saturday night near the home of recently appointed Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit. With his black kippa and gray beard, and his past as Netanyahu’s Cabinet Secretary, they were convinced he’d been assigned to the post to assure the investigations led nowhere. The demonstrations slowly grew, though truth be told, most of us weren’t noticing. Their significance was that they never tired, and that they served as a laboratory for relations between demonstrators and police. The police would arrest some demonstrators, the courts might free them, the police would change tactics and the demonstrators would return to the courts which would affirm or strike down the tactics, and so on.

By the time Mandelblit indicted Netanyahu, in late 2019, there were regular demonstrations in perhaps 20 towns across the country. Then came Covid. Israel never had a political schism about the pandemic. On the contrary. In the early months Netanyahu acted like a true leader. Many evenings he would give a national seminar on live TV, flanked by the top health officials, where he – and they, together – would explain about respiratory diseases (including a short film showing the expanding vapor from a sneeze), and about social distancing. He explained why we desperately needed a vaccine, how it would be developed, and what we must do until then. It was quite impressive, we felt we were in this together, and for a while, things went as well as could be expected. It helped that our death rate remained low, while it was skyrocketing elsewhere.

For a while. Soon the Haredi communities, never educated in science, decided that open schools and synagogues were more important. Then Netanyahu’s justice minister of the day, Amir Ochana, coincidentally decided that of all the government agencies which were trying to stay open, the courts needed to be shut down. The government mulled using top-secret surveillance capabilities to track spreaders of Covid, even as the security services objected. Amir Haskel and others brought sleeping bags and a tent and camped in front of Netanyahu’s home on Balfour St. A young physicist from the Weizmann Institute, Shikma Bressler, launched a protest movement and organized a caravan of hundreds of cars that drove up to Jerusalem – cars being safe from spreading Covid. They flew black flags, harking back to a foundational Supreme Court ruling from 1957 which stated that some military orders are so illegal they must never be obeyed. Soon there were weekly demonstrations dubbed “Balfour” with 15,000 demonstrators and lots of police violence. There were small demonstrations on hundreds of overpasses on the major highways. Netanyahu, true to form, announced that the demonstrators were disseminating Covid out of hatred to him. Standard procedure: there’s a threat, his opponents are behind it, and he’s the only defense.

Balfour being a 15-minute walk from home, I went there regularly. It was uplifting. Here were thousands of young Israelis traveling to Jerusalem each week to reject the rising corruption and populism. They had bands of drummers, plastic trumpets and a repertoire of catchy protest chants. They were fearless in the face of police water cannons. One group always wore pink t-shirts and bandanas, playing on the Hebrew phrase atid varod, pink future, which means optimism. They fashioned funny posters. They exuded good humor. Since the police cordoned the area off, they devised a system of counting whoever came through the police gates, so they knew precisely how many they were. They never tired, returning every week for more than a year. Once the minister of justice tried to invite the leaders to a meeting. The response was that there were no leaders he could deal with – only the entire movement.

The protests ended in May 2021, as Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid were constructing a coalition that would oust Netanyahu. The entire movement went dormant. 18 months later Netanyahu was back.

On January 4^th 2023 newly appointed Justice Minister Yariv Levin gave a speech announcing a raft of legislation that would neuter the independence of our judicial system, curb the media, postpone the next elections, and much more. Some 150 pieces of legislation were proposed, aimed at changing the structure of the government and the entire political system, overriding the rules and institutions, and giving the government almost unlimited power – all in the name of the will of the majority. One change would have allowed elected officials to receive large sums from individuals or groups to cover personal expenses. The Bribery Law, we dubbed it. The whole package we called The Judicial Coup.

For many of us, this seemed like the end of the world. Truly. If Israel isn’t a liberal democracy, what’s the point? If the practical exemption of Haredi men from otherwise compulsory universal military service and decades of reserve duty was codified in law, what made it universal and what justified it being compulsory? If Israel was jettisoning the final, flimsy, pretenses of seeking peace with the Palestinians, replacing them with an aggressive settlement policy geared to create an Apartheid regime, should we or our sons even be serving anymore? If managerial jobs are to be allocated by ties to politicians, as some of the new ministers openly declared, what talented professional would be left to operate the civil service? If our government loudly proclaimed that international monetary institutions were all run by antisemites and their opinions on our economy were worthless, why should we leave our savings in Israel or expect anyone to invest in our startup companies?

For a desperate few weeks in January 2023, many Israelis wondered if they should leave, or encourage their children to leave, or resign themselves to holding out as foreigners in their own land, estranged from their surroundings. Then, shaking off our deep blue funk, we stood up and wrought a miracle instead. 

On a Saturday night in early January 20,000 demonstrators converged on a large open square in Tel Aviv in pouring rain for what became famous as the Umbrella Demonstration. A week or two later the organizers took a leap of faith and moved the demonstration to Kaplan Avenue that had room for hundreds of thousands. They never looked back. For the next 38 weeks Kaplan never saw fewer than 100,000 demonstrators, and often twice that number. 1-2% of the entire population. In Jerusalem we had 3,000 demonstrators on our first attempt, then climbed all the way to 30,000, and rarely went back to fewer than 10,000. In Haifa they passed 50,000. Soon there were smaller rallies every Saturday night at dozens of locations, and eventually more than a hundred sites. Every Saturday from February to October. 3-4% of the population, weekly. Yet the story was always about more than the numbers, impressive as they were. It was about the (re)-invention of a new Israeli identity.

Symbols, abstract as they are, can be extraordinarily powerful. The cross has been motivating everything from the deepest of personal emotions to mass-movements of armies, for two thousand years. Flags are probably the second most powerful symbol. At one of the earliest rallies a handful of far-left protestors hoisted Palestinian flags, hoping to leverage the fear of Levin’s coup into greater support for the two-state solution. Netanyahu’s poison machine gleefully trumpeted that the opposition was a cabal of traitorous lovers of Palestinians. The next week many protestors brought Israeli flags on broomsticks. Within days anonymous volunteers set up a flag factory in an unmarked warehouse. Somone donated enough money to purchase tons of flags. Someone else figured that there weren’t enough broomsticks in the country, but lots of hardware stores had stocks of bamboo-stick garden fences, and bought miles of them. Hundreds of volunteers reported to the warehouse every day, where someone had worked out the most efficient process of unpacking flags and fences and connecting them then re-packing them into sheathes of twenty. Each bamboo pole had a sticker with a note: This flag was prepared by volunteers and funded by donations. Please bring it to every demonstration. Also, a QR code for donations – the group had meanwhile incorporated itself so the whole donations-thing was legal. Bamboo sticks are prickly, so someone brought in lots of padded gloves. As the demonstrations expanded throughout the country, some logistics wizard figured out how many sheaths to send to each site each week on whose pickup truck. There was no prior planning or preparation, since no-one had foreseen any of this.

I don’t know how many flags on bamboo sticks were prepared. No fewer than 500,000; easily a million. They became the symbol of the protest movement. Walking down the street with a flag identified you to friends and foes as a protestor. Police used them to identify protestors when blocking streets or paths. The protest movement soon had a unit of drone operators filming all the demonstrations from above so as to prove their size; the films showed seas of flags. The poison machine was apoplectic: not only were there no Palestinian flags to prove disloyalty, the protestors had appropriated the flag Netanyahu’s camp thought was only theirs.  For us, it was a natural act of emotional potency: it’s our country we’re defending, as patriots, carrying our flag, together. In large numbers.

The drummers of Balfour had proven their value. Now, every local grouping had its own drummer troop. In Jerusalem they were a group of dozens of Hebrew University students and one or two young professors, and they developed a full methodology integrating megaphone enhanced chants, drums, and vuzuvellas – the deafening one-toned South African plastic horn. You send a column of thousands headed by this troop through town, and everyone for blocks around knows you’re there – as we often did. There were a number of extra-large rallies in front of the Knesset, when drummer troops from elsewhere came to town, and you could compare them. I have to admit that the original Pink Front group from Tel Aviv were the loudest and most impressive of all – but then, they’d had years of practice.

 

The question of leadership was fascinating. Initially, the protest movement had none. The elected politicians of the political opposition played no role in the early days, and when they noticed the large numbers of potential voters rallying in the streets and tried to join, they were generally spurned. At Kaplan in Tel Aviv they were never given the stage; elsewhere, each local group made their own decision, so sometime politicians were invited – but mostly not. This partially reflected our disdain of them, as we were doing all the work and they were being useless; we also probably understood our growth potential was greater so long as we weren’t identified with political parties.

From the beginning there was a loose grouping of organizations – dozens of them – who coordinated their efforts. Soon there was a Protest Staff which met weekly and allocated funds to various initiatives. For a few months they were mostly anonymous, and some still are. Their task was not to lead, but to enable, organize, fundraise and support the logistics. When in March President Herzog, notionally a powerless national figurehead, collected various experts and politicians and tried to hammer out a national agreement, the Protest Staff announced there was no-one who could represent them. Should the president’s group agree on a formula, the weekly masses would either be convinced and accept, or they wouldn’t. (No formula was ever found).

Yet also in march the Protest Staff began to expand its activities and ours, and in this we followed their cues. They identified two classes of politicians. Those who were leading the coup, such as Levin and his sidekick MK Simcha Rothman, the Chair of the Constitutional and Legislative Committee in the Knesset; and those who just might, perhaps, be wobbly and persuaded to jump ship. (None did). We were encouraged to demonstrate in front of their homes, at least once a week, not on Saturday night. In Jerusalem we gathered at the large home of Nir Barkat, a worldly high-tech multimillionaire who had been the mayor of Jerusalem and oughtn’t have been a natural fit for a chauvinistic government that was dismantling democracy. It helped that he lives not far from a main traffic artery, so lots of commuters would see and hear our drummers and ruckus.

Then the Protest Staff announced that Thursdays would be Days of Disruption, when we would march through downtown, or on main roads, making life unpleasant for everyone and proving the government had lost control over public space. The law being what it is, the police had to enable some of these actions, much to the fury of Minster of Police Itamar Ben Gvir, one of our top racists, and redoubling the resolve of the coup-masters to abolish freedom of demonstration. The next development was when the Protest Staff realized how powerful we had become, in numbers, geographic distribution and determination. In March they started blasting out immediate calls for urgent action in specific locations: Ben Giver is participating in a ceremony near Atlit! Anyone nearby please get there by 10am and make LOTS OF NOISE! Barkat is giving a speech at a business convention in Kiryat Shemona. If anyone can get into the conference and disrupt it, go! Others should make noise in front of the building. Rothman is participating in a panel on Emek Refaim Road. Drown him out!

I was at that particular one, along with two of our drummers and about 50 other locals. I was especially impressed by the student with the megaphone, who was blasting away with the catchy rhyme Rothman Rothman tevater, anachnu nechushim yoter – Just give up, Rothman, coz we’re more stubborn – which improbably turned out to be true.

The coalition politicians stopped going to events, and tried to hold meetings only inside the Knesset building where there were no demonstrators. Except for the Netanyahu family, who still had an irresistible urge to travel to foreign capitals and stay in luxury hotels. Every weekend they’d travel, and each time they were greeted by slogan-shouting flag-waving demonstrators. They haven’t traveled since March.

The thing that gave the protest movement the feeling it had deeper significance than its immediate cause was the sense of community it forged. There were two or three central WhatsApp lists with hundreds of thousands of members, that blasted out protest-wide updates. There were probably a few dozens of lists with many thousands of members, such as Information Science Professor Karin Nahon’s list that shared short films from each event, every day, sent in from the participants themselves; or lists run by popular protest figures sharing their exhortations, experiences and impressions. There were lists for specific localities – rallies in front of the home of Defense Minister Yoav Galant, say, or the bridge over Route 1 at Ein Hemed. There were ad-hoc lists for specific events, such as the hotel where Ron Desantis was staying in Jerusalem, or anyone who’ll be in London next week when the Netanyahus come to visit. Prof. Nahon estimated there were thousands of lists, large and small.

New organizations sprung up like mushrooms. Law professors explaining legal aspects. Attorneys volunteering to race to the police station every time the police arrested anyone. The attorneys suggested the presence of protestors with trumpets outside the police stations would lift the spirits of those arrested and remind the interrogators we were watching them, so that also became a standard fixture. Women protestors who marched at rallies in the red garb of the Handmaid’s Tale. Let’s Talk was a group that set up tables at commercial centers in right-leaning neighborhoods every Friday morning, and engaged passers-by in political discussions one-on-one, eventually sending out a few thousand volunteers every week. Spreading Hope was an online outfit that created short snappy and highly professional one- or two-minute videos explaining or exhorting or reporting on successes. On average, a film or three every day.  A group of modern orthodox liberals. And Brothers in Arms, a large group of reserve soldiers whose shtick was special operations. Hanging gigantic posters on mountainsides, say, or blockading the homes of far-right ministers Smotrich and Ben Gvir in their settlements deep in the West Bank. They generally launched their operations an hour or two before dawn, as befits combat-trained soldiers; each operation had its own WhatsApp list, carefully vetted so the police wouldn’t have advance information.

We held seminars, on-line seminars and conferences to educate ourselves in constitutional law, the principles and practice of parliamentary democracy, the conditions of Israel’s Arab citizens, and hundreds of other topics that most of us hadn’t much thought of before, and now were at the center of our attention.

All of this showed us something we hadn’t much thought of before: that Israel has a large number of liberal democrats who really care, and will dedicate considerable amounts of time and money for as long as it takes to preserve the society we wish to live in. None of us was alone, none of us need despair. There were large numbers of like-minded people all around us, all over the country. We’ve known about the organized groups that made up our right-wing government – settlers, Haredi, whoever. Yet it turned out we, whom no-one knew about, were the largest group of all, and the only group capable of filling the streets and lining the highways, every week, every month, in all seasons. It was a wakening call, and it was powerful. Rather than emigrate, we’d defend our country. The polls all agreed we were a majority. The liberal Right was on our side. Should this hold to the next elections, we would have the once-in-a-century chance of writing a constitution, and re-directing the Israeli story.

For which we’d need a new cadre of political leaders. We took ever closer looks at the previously unknown individuals who had stepped forward and were dedicating all their waking hours to organizing us. Eyal Naveh of Brothers in Arms. Moran Zach-Katzenstein, founder of the chief women’s’ organization Building an Alternative. Ran Harnevo, founder of Spreading Hope. Moshe Radman, who managed to represent us on all the talk shows. Prof. Karine Nahon. A partial list. And, of course, Prof. Shikma Bressler, whom the Poison Machine hated above all. The minor problem being that they all insisted they wouldn’t seek elected office, proving that the best candidates are recognized by their refusal to seek public office.

Left to right: Ran Harnevo, Shikma Bressler, the undeclared leader of the protest movement, and Eyal Naveh, at a rally in Jerusalem on July 24^th 2023

 

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The 15,000-strong Balfour demonstrations of 2020-21 had something joyful about them. The much larger ones of 2023 were not. We were facing real danger and potentially the end of our homeland as we wished it to be. For many of us, our very participation was soothing. The government’s onslaught might be slowing but it was still advancing. The hate being spewed out by the Poison Machine was corroding our sense of affinity to the millions of Israelis in the political camp that clearly detested us and loathed our way of life. I found myself engaging ever less in the easy banter which Israeli strangers often use in casual encounters – being stuck in line somewhere, say – out of apprehension that it could veer off into animosity. The gigantic rallies were an actual antidote. 200,000 people chanting De-mo-kra-tya! in unison, that’s got power. Look how many of us there are! See how committed we are, how determined the story should have a good ending. anachnu nechushim yoter, we’re more stubborn.

 

Then Hamas invaded, raped and burned. It’s a different story now, but no-one quite knows what it is.