I wonder where all this hatred comes from

Seeing from afar all the hatred being displayed in the streets of Israel, all the destruction that is being done and all the bridges between people that are being removed one after the other, I wonder where does all this come from. After all, these people – take away their labels, “Likud”, “National Unity”, “Yisrael Beytenu”, “Yesh Atid” – they are so similar in many other ways, they have so much in common, and I could easily see them sharing a table and talking long-hours about all the many, many things that they have in common: their kids, their neighborhoods, their common and shared dreams for a better Israel.

And I – the physicist, the pure rational guy – am left with only one explanation: psychological. Deep, deep down, they all know that this could have been different, they all know that they knew from the moment that the results of the November 2022 elections were known, what this government in its present composition would lead them all to. I myself had written in a blog in Times of Israel the same day that the results of the last elections were published, on November 3, 2022:

“If [the secular Zionists] do not make a good-faith effort to join a broad national unity government, they will have only to blame themselves for some unadvisable policies that the future Israeli government could pursue, and for the perception in the world of the new Israeli government as being “too far-right and extremist.” This would be bad for Israel and bad for the Jewish people in the Diaspora.”

They missed the opportunity.

They put their personal egos first – each one wanted so badly to be the next Prime Minister: Yair Lapid, Benny Gantz, Gideon Sa’ar, Avigdor Liberman.

And the myths they generated for this purpose: no need for the judges’ judgement was necessary, the conclusions of the trial seemed so evident to them (in other words, so desired to them), that they rushed to pronounce Netanyahu culpable of every imaginable evil, supplanting the judges’ judgement by their own and feeding this narrative to the public – in order to justify their political behavior.

It is so ironic, that the same people who are willing to defend in the streets the supremacy of the Supreme Court and its judgement above anything else, these same people so happily supplanted the Supreme Court judges by their personal judgement and desires about an individual, Netanyahu, not waiting for the judges’ decision. And they acted accordingly, dragging with them the masses.

I can only explain this irrational drive towards the abyss by the demonstrators in the streets of Israel, in that deep down they hate the situation that they were drawn to, deep-deep down they know that this could have been avoided if their political leaders would have behaved more rationally after the results of the November 2022 elections were known, coldly read the new political map as it was, swallow their egos, and work towards the formation of a government with secular Zionist parties at its core, instead of boycotting the Likud party and its leader, and forcing the Likud to ally themselves with the Religious Zionist party and depend so heavily on the religious parties.