Anyone who is surprised that protests are still ongoing and increasing hasn’t been paying attention.
The country has been gripped by protests since before I made aliyah in 2021, and it’s stayed that way since then. Some seem surprised that protests have continued, but to me it seemed completely clear that they would.
Since the beginning of the political crisis in 2019, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s politics has thrived on maintaining positionalism and division. Instead of offering a clear, concrete, consensus-based vision that even his opponents could buy into, he has offered only empty positioning. No plan, just positioning himself at the center of politics and dividing us into more easily manipulated camps. And the problem is that it worked.
Before the crisis, Netanyahu was far more pragmatic and worked more closely with people from the Center. We need only look at his early governments, where he formed coalitions with groups that he has now alienated. Yisrael Beytenu, Yesh Atid, and Labor all participated and cooperated with him, yet now they seem to have become his biggest rivals.
The crisis caused a fundamental shift in Netanyahu’s approach to politics. Instead of reaching out to the Right and the Left, he moved toward a more exclusionary type of politics. Indeed, we shouldn’t take this to mean exclusion of either Left or Right; the three previously mentioned parties come from across the spectrum and represent a variety of interests.
The protests, seen in this light, are a symptom of exclusionary politics rather than their cause.
THE NASCENT protest movement can be traced to the weekly demonstrations held outside former attorney general Avichai Mandelblit’s house in Petah Tikva. Mandelblit was accused of delaying indictments against Netanyahu in Case 1000, which deals with corruption.
Between the announcement of indictments and their actually being filed, two elections were held. The March 2019 election ended in an absolute dead heat between Likud and Blue and White, the short-lived Lapid-Gantz alliance. The September 2019 election ended similarly with only a slight advantage to Blue and White, but a government failed to form. With indictments filed two months later in November, protests grew.
The March 2020 election would become the tipping point. In the shadow of COVID-19, Benny Gantz broke with his allies to form a unity government with Netanyahu, much to the chagrin of his supporters. Is it any wonder, then, that the low burn of protest became inflamed and began to engulf political discourse across the board?
So now we have people protesting Netanyahu’s indictment, people protesting COVID and its effects, and people protesting Gantz’s entry into the government. Throughout the year the government lasted, protests persisted. That is when they intensified, the police response intensified, and the prime minister dug in deeper.
No wonder the protests intensified; the opposition that was meant to oppose Netanyahu joined him instead, further fracturing an already weak opposition. From that point on, Netanyahu’s strategy switched from attempting to build some level of consensus by incorporating both Left and Right, to pushing fractious factionalism.
The prime minister went from managing competing political parties that could be switched out and played off one another, to gardening. All he could do was keep his coalition partners happy. He has been forced into placating competing interest groups inside his coalition and his party, which further stymied any ability to build a consensus and further alienated his detractors.
THE NATIONAL unity government collapsed in December 2020, and elections were called for March 2021. Netanyahu wins, and gets the first mandate to form a government, but fails, giving Lapid a chance – and he succeeds.
The government formed by the Lapid-Bennett coalition incorporated a broad set of groups from across the political spectrum. The formation of a new government largely removed many of the protesters’ objections.
Netanyahu used his time out of government to fracture and split off members of the coalition, moves that would create neither goodwill among his detractors nor a sense of responsible governance.
When Idit Silman resigned from the government over laws relating to Passover, many accused her of being tempted into doing so by offers of a ministry in a future Netanyahu-led government, a move that would be illegal. Silman received the Environmental Protection Ministry in the 2022 government.
The coalition still held out until left-wing members resigned over issues relating to the conflict in the West Bank before returning. This spooked the right-wing members, leading to another resignation and ultimately the collapse of the government.
Still, no major protests broke out, and there were still opportunities from detractors to prevent Netanyahu’s return to power – via the ballot box.
Netanyahu’s coalition swept to a clear victory thanks to unity among the far-Right and disunity in the Left and among the Arab parties.
Less than two weeks into the new government, protests against its planned judicial reform broke out.
The government’s attempts to force the bill through in the face of large-scale protests, as well as the increasing violence against protesters, only entrenched the opposition.
The protests that waxed and waned: How October 7 shifted Israeli protests
THEN OCT. 7 happened and protests abated as the country reeled and recovered from the horrors. When the protests resumed, they became about returning the hostages.
However, they didn’t become anywhere near as intense as before. Most protests attempted to maintain a sense of being non-political. Indeed, political protest as a whole had largely weakened and disappeared during the war, with most of Israel wanting to focus on the war and national unity rather than possibly divisive protest.
As the war has begun to wind down, political protest has returned to acceptability, initially slowly and then all at once.
The attempt to fire Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) head Ronen Bar and then Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara reopened the unhealed wound in the Israeli consciousness and reminded many people of the tumultuous period of the proposed judicial reform. It reminds many of Netanyahu’s attempt to fire defense minister Yoav Gallant, which drew ire not only from opponents of the government but also from a wide range of groups in Israeli society, including the trade unions and the business councils.
If we want to know why protests have returned, we have to determine whether anything has changed politically between the start of the war and now – and the truth is that very little has changed.
Unless the government tackles the core issues that triggered protests initially, namely distrust in how Netanyahu governs, the protests will never naturally go away.
The writer is a podcast producer and former breaking news editor at The Jerusalem Post. The thesis for which he earned his MA in diplomacy was focused on group politics.