March 4th, 2024 - 16th Report: Wartime Protests

 

March 4th, 2024

Dear family and friends,

Report number 16: wartime protests

Last week a large crowd of Gazans swarmed a food convoy. There was a melee, nearby IDF troops opened fire, and more than 100 civilians were killed. Israel claimed most died in the stampede, not from our fire. French President Emanuel Macron angrily condemned us.  Most of the world (those paying attention, that is) blame us. The Israeli consensus is that we’re blameless. There’s very little willingness among Israelis these days even to recognize what we’re doing to the Gazan population, much less to understand how the world sees it. We’ve convinced ourselves most of the world is antisemitic, so we’re aggrieved and defiant. We’ve got no patience for talk about starvation in Gaza.

There are good reasons for this Israeli mood. Our insistence on focusing on our aggrievement and not on the results of our actions may be explicable and human, but it’s still very dark. For months now I’ve been circling around this subject but haven’t yet written about it. Mea culpa. Today I’m going to continue not facing it directly. Instead, let’s look at the protest movement since October 7^tt. You might have expected the opponents of the government to be more aware of the plight of the Gazans – but no. On the contrary. The opposition itself is surprisingly muted.

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The paradigm for Israelis toppling their government is Motti Ashkenazi in 1974. To comprehend what he was up against, you need to go back to December 1947. The UN General Assembly had just voted to partition Mandatory Palestine, and the resulting Arab violence marked the beginning of Israel’s War of Independence. In mid-December Haim Weitzman said in a speech that “no state has been handed to us on a silver platter”. Nathan Alterman, the best-known poet of the time, liked the phrase and published Magash Hakessef, The Silver Platter, in which two bloodied and deathly fighters, a young man and woman, stagger towards the waiting nation and announce: We are your silver platter. The idea that the sacrifice of our soldiers is the inescapable alternative to the silver platter no-one is offering us if we want our country, was and remains one of the most elemental parts of being Israeli. No surprise, then, that until October 1973 there was no Israeli institution as venerated as the army. No group of people as revered as its commanders. Until the surprise invasion by Egypt and Syria on October 6^th, and the dawning recognition over the following days, then weeks, that someone had catastrophically screwed up.

The public had no warning of the invasion, and that was bad enough. Then it turned out the IDF hadn’t been prepared. Then it further turned out that once the war was upon us, our vaunted military lost its head and made stupid decisions and regular soldiers got killed. The UN Security Council shut down the war before the end of October, but a war of attrition went on until Spring 1974. The reservists were only slowly demobilized. In the elections of December 31^st Golda Meir’s Labor-led coalition lost some seats but stayed in power. Reserve captain Ashkenazi returned home in February, prepared a poster demanding the resignation of the government, and sat in front of the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem. The army had failed, he said, but the government also needed to go. He was joined by dozens, then hundreds, then thousands. In May the government fell.

The current catastrophe is worse than the Yom Kippur War because it happened to civilians. It was only natural to expect even greater public fury towards the government. Even more so as that awesome protest movement was already in place. True, by noon of October 7^th everyone knew the protests against the judicial coup were over, as was the coup itself. Brothers in Arms repurposed their entire effort and by October 8^th they were the largest and most effective support system in the country, soon stepping in to fulfil roles the paralyzed and incompetent government was incapable of facing. But when a handful of protestors stood at the gate to the military headquarters in Tel Aviv, they were booed away – by the very Tel Avivians who had crowded onto Kaplan for nine months. They’d come too early, they recognized, and went home.

In November a group of bereaved families set up a tent across from the Knesset and said they’d not move until the government fell. I juxtaposed them with our new National Library, next door, in report #4. Their harkening back to Motti Ashkenazi was so explicit that they invited him to speak at one of their rallies. He was 50 years older than last time, but the problem was that too many of the 500-some demonstrators had personal memories of him. Not a good sign if you’re trying to ignite a mass protest movement. These days their tent is mostly empty.

Where’s the protest movement?

On that Black Saturday uncounted thousands of protestors raced to their reserve units, and went to battle alongside their fellow reservists from the opposite political camp. Till this day I have not heard a single account of any political acrimony influencing any military units. On the contrary. Everyone knows the political strife of 2023, harsher than anything we’d ever known, was simply irrelevant in the ranks. Poof, gone.

Not because the war government was suddenly popular. Netanyahu’s coalition of 64 MKs, elected in November 2022, had been hovering around 54 for most of 2023 because of the judicial coup. Since a month into the war there have been weekly polls, and support for the government has dropped to 44 or less. Netanyahu’s personal support hovers around 33%. Yet it’s the elected coalition of 64 that still rules, and they won’t be dislodged without prolonged massive protests. We all know that. Yet the massive protests aren’t happening.

There’s no single explanation. Even in the minds of people who abhor the government but aren’t protesting, there seem to be multiple considerations.

There’s the Benny Gantz thing. Gantz, a retired chief of staff in his mid-60s, joined politics five or six years ago to beat Netanyahu. He’s totally centrist, potentially attracting voters from both main camps. He’s never incites against anyone. He appears to have human empathy. He convincingly puts the national interest above his personal ones. He’s as different from Netanyahu as they come. He’s not a political killer, and early on, matching them was a bit like pitting Alice in Wonderland against Machiavelli. As time passed, he acquired political skills, while remaining fundamentally decent. According to the polls he was the main beneficiary of the protest movement.

A week into the war he joined the government in return for two seats on the newly-created six-member War Cabinet, which was structured to give him a partial veto. The second seat went to Gadi Eizenkot, his successor as top general. Their arrival conferred legitimacy on the government. Rather than Netanyahu running the show, whom the protestors don’t trust, he was balanced by a retired generals whom we do. Gantz’ approval rating is currently about 50%.

Gantz and Eisenkot say they’ll leave the government after the emergency. Many protestors won’t return until then – though some of us wonder if perhaps it’s time to start protesting against them, too?

The next consideration is the yearning for unity. No-one pretends we’ll ever always be alike. No chance. We’re far too diverse for that. Decades ago, however, most Israelis felt they were engaged in a national joint project. I don’t know if this was ever really true, but it’s what we told ourselves. Netanyahu has been attacking that unity for thirty years. The fact that Gantz  - Nice Mister Center – began rising in the polls parallel to our national strife, was an early indication of this yearning. The war re-forged the old unity, and many Israelis are determined not to let it slip away, even if that means the current coalition remains in place for a while longer.

There’s a reluctance to clashing at home while our soldiers are fighting together at the front. It’s not as if we’ve never done so – during the 1982 war in Lebanon we did. But that came with intense acrimony, and scarred us. Our discord until October 7^th was so much worse than 1982 that apparently many of us are willing to allow Netanyahu to stay in power a bit longer if that preserves our unity.

There’s another emotional block to demonstrating: people are simply too sad. We recently spent a week in Vienna. Ii was a bit discomfiting for me to be in a place that’s just normal, where people live their private lives unaffected by history. Five months into this war, we’re still far from that. For months the pervasive emotion here, even more than fury or revenge, was sadness. It turns out that when you’re sad, you reduce your activities, and that includes demonstrating. How many former committed protestors have said to me “Not Yet, Yaacov. I desperately want this government gone, and I know we’ve got to demonstrate, but I can’t. Not yet. It’s too painful. I’m too sad”.

Then there’s the question what the goal of the protestors should be. From January till October the answer was clear: we’re saving democracy. There were other goals, too, such as ending the government’s corruption, or demanding the participation of the Haredi in society, but they were subordinate. Since the war started, there are at least two conflicting goals.

The first is supporting the families of the hostages. This issue is the only one that brings out thousands of demonstrators every week. But not hundreds of thousands. Their demand of the government, is to pay the price and get the hostages back. This isn’t necessarily an anti-government stance, and some of these demonstrators are even pro-government, though not many. The families themselves are divided, some still clinging to the line that they’re loyally encouraging their government to be bold. Others have given up on the empathy of the government and are moving towards a more antagonistic position: the government must prioritize the return of the hostages even though this will mean relinquishing some of its military goals. This tension – goals vs hostages – is what keeps the demonstrations small-ish. Too many Israelis prefer destroying Hamas at any price to paying for the hostages to return.

The second goal of the protestors is new elections. Interestingly, between January and October 2023, calls for new elections were muted and sidelined. There had just been elections. Netanyahu’s camp had won, narrowly, and the other camp had made some awful tactical mistakes which had enhanced their own defeat (too many similar parties, which wasted too many votes). We were on the streets to defend democracy, so we couldn’t be calling for the effective annulment of elections we’d just lost. The elected government needed to stop changing the rules, and then we’d take a deep breath and let them govern. Now everything has changed. The failure of the government was so colossal, and our trust in them has been so fully destroyed, that we need new elections to choose a government the people trust.

The polls say two thirds of voters agree with this position – roughly the same two thirds who say they’ll vote for a different government. Yet apparently many of them, maybe even a majority, accept Netanyahu’s current claim that we can’t afford to run a war and elections simultaneously. He has been convincingly candid on this: if there’s election campaigning, we’ll tear into each other with ferocity (guess who’s planning it), and we can’t afford that while at war. Just give me more time, I’ll win the war decisively, and then we’ll see. (Subtext: After I win, you won’t want elections because you’ll love me again, those who’ve jumped camps).

I find this line of reasoning as infuriating as everything else he says, but I’m here to report, not convince, and my report is that many people accept this call for delay, and refuse to demonstrate.

Finally, there’s an explanation I hadn’t thought of until recently: That our massive resistance in defense of democracy included considerably more right-wingers than we thought. Netanyahu’s poison machine invested great efforts in attacking the protestors as Lefties, according to his basic rule that anyone who isn’t for him is Left and traitorous. Even at the time, anyone with clear eyes knew not all the protestors were Left. Looking back, I think we overlooked how many of them were actually center-right. People who are moderately hawkish on the Palestinian issue. Not racists, messianists, Haredi or corrupt – but both right-wing and liberal-democrats.  This should be a source of optimism, because it means Israeli democracy is quite strong, and a wide spectrum of Israelis are still committed to it. But it also means that now that the point of the protests has shifted from defending democracy to ridding ourselves of an awful government – now that our national discussion is once again firmly within the democratic framework – the potential for protests is reduced.

People are complicated, and none of these explanations need stand alone. Some people trust Gantz, and yearn for unity, and are sad, and prefer, if they must protest, to demonstrate for the hostages and not against the government, or their dislike for the government means they’ll vote against it, but they’re not bothered enough to demonstrate. Or any sub-combination of these and other considerations.

On October 7^th the entire protest movement shut down. Some individuals then tried to re-activate it, with no success. In November or December a few of its leaders decided, as individuals, to call for elections, and to demonstrate for them. Soon there were a few thousand protestors weekly. Early January, if I remember correctly, the video group Spreading Hope began calling its followers to demonstrate. By February all the groups were back. Yet in mid-February when they announced they’d return to Kaplan Avenue on Saturday night, the police blocked them on a technicality – and they accepted the ruling. Before the war they’d never have been so meek. As of this writing, early March, there are weekly demonstrators in dozens of locations, and other activities are growing, but I doubt the numbers pass 25,000, if even that. The largest numbers are still at the demonstrations demanding the return of the hostages, not new elections. Netanyahu, for his part, is still exhorting us to fight and kill and fight and kill, and worry about politics some other year.

Lest this be too bleak, here’s another, final thought. Netanyahu’s many years of rule have been an era of the strongman, a father-of-the-nation figure in the eyes of his voters, the abdication of political thought in return for adulation. The worse this has gotten, the more it has called forth a reaction. The protests which have been building for years were leaderless, and the gigantic protests of 2023 were, too. The surprising demonstration of this is that even as all the people we looked at to coordinate and direct our efforts last year, have now returned to exhorting us back onto the streets, our masses aren’t coming. We may be entering a truly new era of Israeli politics, in which the nation decides for itself, and the task of its leaders is to coordinate and direct, not command and dictate.

Yaacov