🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
Less than four months ago, when the most racist, reactionary government in Israel's history took office pledging to castrate the Supreme Court—with the understood, primary goal being to spring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from his trial for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust—some people here thought there would be a "civil revolt."
Probably more thought the center-left opposition would roll over, like it had for a generation as the Netanyahu-led right swallowed up Israeli politics, normalizing Israel's colonial military rule over the Palestinians and the right's demagogic hatred of Arabs, African refugees, and Jewish leftists.
Yet even the optimists here never anticipated a civil revolt like this one.
Barely a week after the government took office, tens of thousands of Israelis protested in Tel Aviv against the so-called judicial reform (which the media here typically refer to as the "judicial coup"). The following Saturday night, the protests spread to Jerusalem and Haifa, with close to 100,000 people. Since then, every Saturday night and occasionally on weekdays, hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of protesters have gone out into the streets up and down the country, and the movement keeps growing wider in political appeal and bolder in expression.
As I write this, Tuesday, Israeli Memorial Day, many families of soldiers killed in battle have been shouting "Shame!" and "Leave!" at government ministers and parliamentarians speaking at the cemeteries. When Netanyahu spoke at Jerusalem's Mount Herzl cemetery, a number of bereaved families in the audience rose from their seats and walked out.
Ahead of Tuesday night, when Memorial Day ends and Independence Day begins on the Jewish calendar, activists were gearing up for a protest-cum-celebration that they said would be the biggest turnout yet, with perhaps a million anti-government revelers nationwide in this country of 10 million.
All this is utterly unprecedented in Israel's 75 years, and this is just a partial list of the acts of civil revolt that the government's bid to destroy the country's democracy has provoked. Netanyahu, who froze the coup legislation under pressure from the escalating, highway-blocking protests, pledges to bring the package back into the Knesset after the spring holiday recess. Yet it's difficult to believe he's foolhardy enough to light up the new Israeli "street" even higher for the sake of a disastrously unpopular policy, especially when the Supreme Court seems almost certain to declare it unconstitutional if it passes.
Polls show the Knesset opposition, led by former general Benny Gantz and former media personality Yair Lapid, winning an election today by a wide margin. Every Israeli VIP who's taken a public position on the coup and isn't a nationalist or religious extremist has denounced it. Netanyahu, long the master of Israeli politics, isn't just on the defensive now; he's on the run.
His drivers at times must find alternate routes to his speaking venues because protesters have blocked the main access road. He canceled a speech this week before once-adoring American Jews in Jerusalem for fear of being targeted by protests, which turned on the government's people present and disrupted the meeting. When Netanyahu travels to foreign capitals like London or Rome, he has to drive past hundreds or thousands of chanting Israeli expats and other Jewish liberals waving Israeli flags. Unprecedented.
The opposition—centrists, liberals, leftists, Arabs and the moderate right—is clearly defeating the Netanyahu bloc of extreme rightists (religious and secular). It seems en route to turning back the judicial coup attempt, and from there its road to political power is open. The sane, decent Israel, after so long in the doldrums, has finally remembered how to roar.
The movement's watchword, its signature chant, is "dem-o-kra-tia!" And it is saving democracy—the Supreme Court, the rule of law— within "Israel proper," the land bounded by Israel's borders before it conquered the Palestinians in the 1967 Six Day War.
But the movement is often criticized for closing its eyes to the absence of democracy in the West Bank, where nearly 3 million Palestinians live under Israeli military rule and a half-million Israeli Jewish settlers gobble up more and more of their land. Meanwhile, 2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are trapped behind an Israeli blockade, nearly 400,000 in East Jerusalem are little freer than those in West Bank, and while the 2 million Arab residents of Israel proper are citizens, the truly systemic discrimination they face makes them second-class citizens at best.
For Israel this is, of course, the big one. The Jewish state's 56-year military rule over the Palestinians and 75-year maltreatment of its own Arab citizens remains the country's preponderant moral blight, its worst offense against democracy.
The protest movement has chosen—wisely, for now—to keep away from this issue because it would split the ranks and allow Netanyahu to brand it as "leftist," the most hated term in the Israeli political lexicon after "terrorist." Since the peace process collapsed in the mid-2000s, demonstrations against Israel's treatment of Palestinians have dwindled to nothing. If the anti-coup protests had made this a dominant theme, they would have failed.
But if they succeed, and if the opposition ends up taking power, the energy, sense of achievement and hope for the future will make it impossible for the sane, decent Israel to put aside the Palestinians and Arab citizens any longer. Most of the protesters probably would very much like to end Israeli rule over the Palestinians and discrimination against Arab citizens; they've seen that this is an escalating, radicalizing force that by now lifts miscreants like the proudly racist, gun-slinging Itamar Ben-Gvir to national power, in his case as minister of national security.
But it's one thing to block government legislation; it's another to force hundreds of thousands of West Bank settlers, including tens of thousands of the worst, most militant radicals in the country, out of their homes to make room for a Palestinian state. That's the most daunting "obstacle to peace," but far from the only one.
If the odds are clearly in favor of the judicial coup being stopped, they're clearly against that becoming a springboard for doing what Israel of the 1990s through mid-2000s failed to do – make peace and justice between Jews and Arabs in this country. That seems like just too much to hope for. But then again, "just too much to hope for" is a pretty good, ironic summation of events so far in Israel 2023. Land of miracles, anyone?
Larry Derfner is an American-born journalist in Israel, author of the memoirs No Country for Jewish Liberals and Playing Till We Have to Go—A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A., and lead singer for the rock 'n' soul band The NightCallers.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
