TEL AVIV.- “A round of applause for all of us here! We are more than 100,000! “It is the largest demonstration since the war began!”celebrated on Saturday from the stage, symbolically located – for the first time since the Hamas attack on October 7 – at the intersection in Tel Aviv that the City Council renamed Democracy Square because protests against the judicial reform of the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It is the same mass of national flags, but with a motto (“Elections now”) and a different context. Shai Meidar, from the anti-government organization, summed it up from the stand. The day afterand recruited, like 300,000 other reservists: “Every day I live the contradiction of serving my country as a reservist under a government that I do not trust and that conducts this war with an absolute lack of responsibility”. Lior Akerman, researcher and former high command of the intelligence services, described it in the same way: “We are forced to fight against an external enemy and against the one whose role on October 7 was supposed to be to defend us.”
They did not cry out against the war. In fact, 88% of Israeli Jews support it and more than half oppose the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza while there are hostages and advocate that the army use even more force. They did it against the management of Netanyahu, the man who has been in power the longest and whom Israelis love or hate, with no middle ground. Increasingly, the latter believe that it is artificially prolonging the war for political survival and take to the streets, with a mixture of old slogans (“Bibi!” [Netanyahu], home!”) and new ones, like “Pact now!” or “Everyone now!”, to pay the price Hamas is asking for the 133 hostages left in Gaza. They are, above all, the same, but less numerous, and in the same city (Tel Aviv), who took to the streets against the judicial reform for nine months of 2023.
Their faces reflected the rarefied atmosphere in which Israel marks six months of war this Sunday. The collective emotion has been mutating. First, it was the surprise and sadness at the deadliest day in the country’s history. The stories of cold-blooded murders and of civilians waiting for hours for the soldiers to arrive, which awakened all the ghosts of helplessness of the Holocaust. The euphoria over the destruction in Gaza followed, as a kind of redemptive revenge with a discourse of criminalization of civilians. Now there is a feeling of lack of direction and that Netanyahu has no plan other than to prolong the invasion as much as possible for mere political survival. The motto “Together we will win” continues to decorate buildings and illuminated signs everywhere, but it already sounds like an empty slogan.
First, the facts. Israel has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians (according to the Hamas government’s Ministry of Health) and left half of Gaza in rubble and hundreds of thousands of people on the brink of famine, by using food as a weapon of war. It buried its international image and lacks a realistic plan to end the war and for the day after. International pressure has stopped the invasion of Rafah, which was announced more than a month ago, and still has some 130,000 citizens (more than 1% of the population) evacuated from the borders with Lebanon and Gaza without a clear horizon for their return.
Its army – the most powerful in the Middle East – did not complete, however, a single objective: the return of all the hostages (133 remain and, of these, at least a quarter have already died), completely destroy Hamas politically and militarily and ensure that Gaza “no longer represents a threat”. Netanyahu insists that “total victory” is “within reach,” after dismantling 18 of Hamas’ 24 battalionsand the final blow inexorably involves invading Rafah, a precarious refuge for the majority of Gazans and where their own allies have drawn a red line.
“Today it is clear to everyone – except for those who follow him blindly – that the promises of ‘total victory’ that Netanyahu makes one day, one day too, are totally useless”wrote on Friday Amos Harel, military affairs commentator for the newspaper Haaretz. “The expectation of dismantling the Hamas regime and annihilating all its military capabilities was too high, certainly within a rigid time frame of a few months. The war was destined to be prolonged and it is hard to believe that it will be possible to completely dismantle the regime even in the future.”
Israel has also never been closer to a war with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah or even with Iran, after assassinating one of its main military commanders on Monday. Eran Etzion, deputy director general of Israel’s National Security Council, on Saturday defined that decision just now as one of “the most scandalous” in the country’s history, since “The probability of response is quite high.” “Israel is at the greatest strategic disadvantage in its history, but the government responsible for it brings us to the brink of a war with an enemy more powerful and sophisticated than any we have ever known,” at a time when its international image “ is at a historic low”, its main ally (the United States) does not trust Netanyahu, the Arab countries are tired of unsuccessfully seeking a ceasefire in Gaza and Europe sees the war as “damaging to its strategic agenda.”
“Six months after embarking on a war supposedly intended to restore security, it can be said that Israel is much less secure and faces many more threats, theaters and fronts than at any other time” of its 75 years of history, Mairav Sonszein, senior analyst on Israel at the International Crisis Group analysis center, lamented on Saturday on the social network an imminent retaliation.
The debate around Netanyahu
The debate – often more personal than political and more emotional than ideological – revolves around Netanyahu. It is, in a way, as if Israel has returned to October 6. The government is in danger due to an issue that greatly affects the more secular Israel of European origin that was already protesting against the judicial reform: the exemption from compulsory military service for the ultra-Orthodox.
Last week, those who demanded the resignation of the premier, an early election and an agreement for the return of the hostages demonstrated together. Struggles sometimes connect. At the end of the protest in the Plaza de la Democracia, they called to join the protest of the families of the hostages, in the same city. The trust gap between the government and the latter has been growing due to the conviction that Netanyahu is stopping a second exchange with Hamas for obscure personal convenience. Charged in three cases of corruption, would lose the elections easily, according to all the polls released since October 7. The Hamas attack left its credentials in tatters. “Mr. Security”. The judicial reform, today in a drawer, had already worn down his popularity.
One of the reasons that leads more Israelis to assume that Netanyahu is buying time is the proximity of the elections in the United States. It’s November and Donald Trump is the favorite. It is a risky bet, because they had a bad relationship when they coincided in power. Also because it is difficult to understand what Trump wants. He advocates for a ceasefire, because he is “not sure” he likes how Israel is conducting the war and because “it is losing the public relations battle,” but encourages it to “quickly finish what it has started” to return. “to normality and peace.” And he has gone so far as to hold the president, Joe Biden, directly responsible for the October 7 attack: “They don’t respect him, he can’t put two words together, he’s stupid.” […]. They never would have done it if I were there [en la Casa Blanca]”.
Israel is not yet isolated. But more and more voices are asking to turn off the tap.
By Antonio Pita