What the Current Protests in Israel Are Really About

“An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”

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Many Israelis love to protest — and I say that in a good way.

At the same time, the rallies that we have been seeing across Israel are not most of Israel. Indeed, only a few hundred-thousand people are showing up to these demonstrations. That is no more than five percent of the Jewish state’s total population.

Many argue that not all Israelis who agree with the protests attend them. That is probably true, but even if all the Israelis who are currently protesting and agree with the protests voted in an election, their party would lose by a landslide.

This is primarily because the majority of these protests are run by leftists, whereas the majority of Israelis are not leftists. Since (but not only because of) the failed Oslo Accords by which Israelis were promised true peace with the Palestinians by Israeli leftists — and instead received the Second Intifada — a healthy majority of Israelis are centrists and Right-leaning.

October 7th only (and justifiably) made an overwhelming amount of Israelis more centrist and Right-leaning, and that has nothing to do with whether or not they support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Many centrists and Right-leaning Israelis are sick of Netanyahu, but let’s not forget: Israel, unlike places such as the United States, has many mainstream parties across the sociopolitical spectrum. Netanyahu’s Likud party is just one of them.

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There are three types of protests that have been making headlines since October 7th.

First, there’s Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, which is exclusively dedicated to the hostages and has zero political influence whatsoever. Among other exhibits, there is a mock underground tunnel where visitors can walk through to get a glimpse of what the hostages have been unfathomably enduring in Gaza.

Then there are the protests under Begin Bridge in Tel Aviv, where attendees unite with the abductees’ family members. This past Saturday, they announced that from now on the bridge will be called “Desolation Bridge” because, according to Israeli Reserve Major General Noam Tivon, who was among those that fought independently against the 3,000 Palestinians as they infiltrated Israel on October 7th, said:

“There has never been such neglect in the history of the State of Israel, as the neglect of the abductees from the omission of October 7th. Those who are to blame for the neglect are the same people who are responsible for the omission and the massacre — the Israeli government. And Benjamin Netanyahu was taught (during his military service) not to leave wounded in the field. These are the real values ​​of the State of Israel.”

Finally, there are the even more political, anti-government rallies, the main one of which is at Tel Aviv’s largest intersection, on Kaplan Street directly across from the IDF’s headquarters. And there are also other similar rallies in Jerusalem and other cities across Israel — all of which take place weekly on Saturday evenings.

There, protest leaders get on stage and speak into a microphone to hundreds of thousands of attendees, using vulgar, no-holds-bar diction to blame Israel’s current government, headed by Netanyahu.

At these demonstrations, high-profile Israelis are among the speakers, including politicians and celebrities, as well as relatives of the hostages and even freed hostages themselves. These rallies originally began as calls for the government to work toward returning the hostages but have evolved into Left-wing juggernauts — which should not be a surprise to anyone.

The dark reality is that, at least according to John Spencer (an urban warfare expert who served for more than 25 years in the U.S. military), there are four continuities in the nature of war, chiefly that war is political.¹ This means that not everyone will agree with why and how their country fights and prosecutes a war, which is both understandable and necessarily acceptable in a democratic society.

It also means that those in charge of the country are continuously making political decisions with regard to why and how they choose to fight and prosecute the war. Indeed, there is no such thing as objectively “right” and “wrong” in much of war, just a difference of perspectives and opinions based on knowledge, education, intellect, life experiences, sociopolitical and other beliefs, worldviews, and a host of other variables.

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Recently, I went to one of the mega-rallies on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv because I wanted to experience it firsthand, rather than just reading about the police arresting protestors and supposedly using “excessive force.”

While I did not see any malicious behavior from protestors or police officers on this one Saturday evening, I quickly picked up on the fact that there is a tremendous overlap between these protestors and the protestors who were taking to Israel’s streets every week before October 7th, to demonstrate against the controversial judicial reforms put forward by Netanyahu’s governing coalition.

This told me two things: Many of these protestors are using the hostages as a prop to push their political agendas, which is disingenuous and uncomfortable. And many of these protestors have not, since October 7th, learned a thing about Israel’s geopolitical circumstances, namely the harsh realities of being the only democracy in the Middle East.

I am a big believer in updating my beliefs after major events take place, such as but not only October 7th. I am also keenly aware of the gross negligence that was probably displayed by Netanyahu, other politicians, and parts of Israel’s security establishments leading up to October 7th.

All of these people, Netanyahu not withstanding, must be held accountable to the highest-possible degree when that time comes, and it should probably come sooner than later (although probably not during this war itself, unless it becomes clear and obvious to a large portion of Israelis that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own sake).

At the same time, Iran’s Islamist revolution took place in 1979 — and that regime has been engaging in overt, dangerous anti-Israel actions and rhetoric since then, far before Netanyahu became a politician, no less prime minister. And Iran is the destabilizing force in the Middle East, which is why this is a two-front war led by Hamas against Israel via the Iranian tentacles known as Hezbollah (in Lebanon) and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (in the Gaza Strip).

We cannot ignore this part of the equation, which is what it seems many Israeli protestors have been doing. They act as if the current Israeli government is 100-percent to blame for October 7th — an oversimplified, immature, and even risky way of thinking about this day and the subsequent war.

If we were to pie chart everyone to blame for October 7th, the current Israeli government might be 50, 60, or even 70 percent of it. But that leaves, at least 30 other percentage points, and I never seem to hear Israeli leftists talking about the other aspects as well.

If you wail and scream about how the Israeli Right is destroying the Jewish state, while not updating your beliefs and having a more nuanced conversation about current events, I could make the argument that the Israeli Left is also engaging in behaviors that are destructive to the Jewish state. And I have minimal patience with people who blame others for the very actions of which they are also guilty.

For example, I have a 70-something-year-old Israeli cousin who was born and raised on a kibbutz and is very smart. He is also an extreme secular leftist and often gets on his high horse to talk about how some Right-wing Israelis wrongfully “hate Arabs.”

In the same breath, the way that he talks about religious Jews is quite similar to how some Israelis talk about Arabs. If you preach that hate is plainly wrong and completely unjustified — while simultaneously broadcasting your hate of others — there is a term for this: hypocrite.

The rhetoric from some in Israel’s Left has become so inappropriate (and that leash is pretty damn long in Israeli society) that our president, Isaac Herzog (a former Left-leaning politician), had to come out and make a statement on Sunday, urging Israelis to temper inflammatory rhetoric and accusations of treason between political opponents, warning that verbal abuse can lead to physical violence if left unchecked.

“In recent weeks, I have been horrified again and again by words of the most awful type — saturated with hate, saturated with violence,” he said, delivering remarks at a celebration of Hebrew Book Week at the President’s Residence.

On Sunday evening, video circulated of Ayala Metzger, the daughter-in-law of Yoram Metzger (a hostage killed in captivity in Gaza) telling a crowd that if the remaining hostages do not return, “we’ll be waiting [for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] with a noose.”

In his remarks on Sunday, President Herzog added, “When groups incite and accuse each other of trying to undermine and destroy the country, it is clear to all of us that something terrible is happening here — something that begins with verbal violence, but that I suspect really won’t end there.”

He decried violent statements “against families of hostages and bereaved families, against the chief and commanders of the IDF and the security agencies, against women and members of the media, against the judiciary and judges, against ministers and Knesset members and against the incumbent prime minister” — which, he said, have become “commonplace.”

“Have we learned nothing from our history?” Herzog asked, seemingly alluding to the political environment in Israel in the months before a religious extremist assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

“The very fact that I have to speak about this, when we are in the middle of a war…” he added. “We must not forget that our bitter and cruel enemies celebrate when they hear and see violence and hatred among us.”

That said, I think it is important to give some of the leftist Israeli protestors the benefit of the doubt, especially those directly affected by anyone who has been killed as a result of October 7th, and all those who have a relationship with one of the abductees and their families and friends.

Viktor Frankl, the great Austrian psychologist who survived the Holocaust, used to say: “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”

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1. John Spencer on X