Why the Israeli protest movement matters

The murder of Carmel Gat, Ori Danino, Alex Lubanov, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, and Almog Sarusi at the hands of their Hamas captors has brought Israel to a new low point of hopelessness and despair. Several of them were set to be freed in the first phase of the hostage deal that Prime Minister Netanyahu scuttled weeks earlier, according to a report by Yediot Ahronot.

With Netanyahu prioritizing the Philadelphi corridor over a hostage deal and as talks with Hamas seemingly hit an impasse, the hostages’ freedom—and with it the opportunity to wind down the multiple fronts of this war—has never felt more remote. Israelis are stuck in the perpetual nightmare of October 7: abandoned by an unaccountable prime minister willing to sell them out to stay in power, threatened by a world increasingly hostile to their very existence.

The one bright spot that has emerged in the past week is the reinvigoration of the Israeli protest movement. For the first time since October 7, true masses of Israelis felt compelled to take to the streets to demand a hostage deal, an end to the war, and call for elections. This past Saturday, an estimated 500,000 Israelis protested on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street, the largest demonstration in the country’s history.

Protests alone are not enough to bring the hostages home or send Netanyahu back home to Caesarea—nor are either of those immediate-term goals enough to extricate Israel from the current morass. Apologists for the current government have framed the demonstrations as a victory for Hamas; left-wing critics of Israel argue that they offer nothing to Palestinians facing devastation in Gaza and escalating settler provocations in the West Bank. In reality, these protests should be a source of hope and inspiration for those who care about Israel’s long-term survival as Jewish and democratic—and for those whose priority is a just future for the region as a whole.

There is legitimate uneasiness among many Israelis and Jews worldwide surrounding these protests. When the country is fighting an arguably existential war—not just against Hamas, but the Iranian axis at large—stoking internal divisions could serve the enemy by signaling to them that Israel is weak. Last year, Nasrallah interpreted the unrest surrounding the judicial overhaul as Israeli society beginning to unravel. This concern is even more acute when hostages are involved. A common critique of the ongoing protests is that they strengthen Hamas’ hand in the negotiations by ratcheting up pressure on Israel, enabling the terror group to take a tougher stance. The understandable discomfort with protesting the government during wartime is likely what kept Israelis from taking to the streets in large numbers until recently.

There are several problems with this argument. First, blaming the protesters for dividing Israeli society reverses cause and effect. Despite his hollow calls for unity and tough talk on security, it is Netanyahu who is prioritizing personal interests over the good of the country by prolonging the war and delaying the return of the hostages—not to mention handing the keys of the police force and the West Bank to ideological pyromaniacs. The same was true about the judicial overhaul, when large numbers of Israelis saw the government as violating democratic norms and seeking to change the fundamental character of the state as Jewish and democratic. Netanyahu is not uniquely to blame for the impasse in the talks; Hamas is not an honest actor and there is no guarantee that a different prime minister would have had greater success in bringing the hostages home. But when top security officials, including a right-wing defense minister, say that the prime minister is allowing unnecessary conditions to imperil a deal, Israelis are going to be inclined to believe them and call a spade a spade.

The concern about the protests strengthening Hamas or misplacing blame is valid, but it reflects an incomplete view of the strategic picture. The current moment is not only about Israel’s survival in the face of external threats, but internal ones as well. The long-term threat posed by Netanyahu’s government and its terror-supporting elements is no less grave than the one posed by Hamas and its ilk. The longer the far-right stays in power, the more likely we are to see a significant rise in ethnic violence in the West Bank, an erosion of civil liberties in Israel, a deterioration in ties with the US, and the collapse of the emerging US-led regional coalition opposed to the Islamic Republic. Israelis cannot afford to let this government endure unchallenged in the name of unity when the country’s security—not to mention its character—is at stake. If a deal isn’t happening due to Netanyahu’s conditions, how the protests could impact the negotiations makes little difference anyway.

There is another line of critique from the other side of the political map frequently levied at Israel’s anti-Netanyahu protests, including this current round: that they ignore Palestinians in Gaza. Most Israeli Jews supporting a ceasefire and opposing Netanyahu’s management of the war do not do so from a place of empathy with Palestinians, with the exception of a few left-wing groups. Whether it comes from blindness or apathy, Israeli Jews’ unwillingness to seriously confront the humanitarian repercussions of the war is consistent with a broader indifference to the Palestinian issue, including political questions surrounding the future of Gaza and the West Bank. In 2023, Israelis rightly sounded the alarm about how castrating the courts threatens democracy, but far fewer have spoken out about Bezalel Smotrich’s efforts to advance West Bank annexation, the endgame of which is permanent Israeli rule over millions of Palestinians without voting rights.

To many outside observers, it is unfathomable that Israelis wouldn’t be moved by the suffering of Palestinians and embrace a more robust public debate about how the war could have been waged differently (even while also acknowledging Hamas’ fault and utter disregard for Palestinian lives.) The reality is that Israelis’ all-consuming post-October 7 trauma leaves them with little emotional bandwidth for anything else. Israelis see themselves as under attack—not only by Iranian proxies, but also on the international stage—and feel acutely threatened by the Palestinians’ unwillingness to openly disavow Hamas and October 7. This isn’t to say that Palestinian civilians aren’t deserving of sympathy or that it is legitimate for Israelis to dismiss them all as Hamas supporters deserving of death. But it is unrealistic to expect large numbers of Israelis to speak up on behalf of Palestinians when they can see little beyond the existential threats facing their country—just as it is unrealistic to expect large numbers of Palestinians in Gaza to advocate for Israelis as they endure unimaginable suffering and upheaval.

For Israelis, despair is a natural reaction to this unimaginably dark moment, as the reality sets in that the remaining hostages may not be coming home alive and that Netanyahu is willing to sacrifice them to stay in power. Despite the legitimate misgivings about these protests—both related to their strain on Israeli social cohesion in the face of external terror threats and their blindness to the Palestinian issue—they provide something that little else can: hope. With Israel’s democratic character at stake, that hundreds of thousands of Israelis feel compelled to take to the streets during wartime is an encouraging sign of a deeply democratic ethos and unshakeable will to survive that bodes well for the country’s future.