On Sunday, Israel was rocked by massive demonstrations organized by the families of released hostages and those still being held in Gaza. The main demands included calls for a ceasefire and a deal to immediately bring all of the remaining hostages home.
The protests, which according to organizers involved more than 2.5 million people, point to a serious crisis for Netanyahu and his right-wing supporters who have threatened to remove the Prime Minister if he does not continue to escalate the occupation of Gaza. They also highlight the very real shifts in Israeli society that have been taking place since the beginning of the genocide. Though still a minor phenomenon, there has been a tendency toward radicalization within Israeli society, including a growing refusenik movement, that is expressed in these mobilizations. Even if their horizon remains limited, the sheer scale of the protests puts real pressure on Netanyahu at a moment of military escalation.
However, while there may be a growing and still very small minority of Israelis organizing against the genocide, the vast majority of those who came out on Sunday were focused almost exclusively on the release of hostages, not the horrors being perpetrated in their name in Gaza. As reporter Oren Ziv told Democracy Now: most Israelis are “not speaking directly on the suffering in Gaza, on the killings, on the children, on the starvation,” but are instead focused on the survival of the hostages held in Gaza. Indeed, even as protesters took to the streets, Israel was continuing to rain down bombs on Gaza City, as it had been doing for several days, and reports suggest that the massive displacement of people from the city to the south of the enclave is already underway.
While there were protests and barricades erected across the country, the largest demonstrations by far were in Tel Aviv. According to Haaretz, 500,000 people attended the rally in Tel Aviv’s “Hostage Plaza,” making it the largest protest there in almost a year.
Speakers at the rally, including the parents of several hostages, strongly criticized Netanyahu’s handling of the war, blaming him for the attacks on October 7, and complaining that he is using the war for his own political gain.
“I feel that our grief and our anxiety bring pleasure to this sadistic leadership sitting in Jerusalem, calculating how to survive at the expense of our suffering,” said one parent, adding: “My child is suffering because the government wants to conquer territory – and I am not willing to sacrifice my son on your altar.”
Other speakers expressed similar criticisms of Netanyahu and Israeli President Isaac Herzog, in particular, for failing to call for an end to the war.
While the protests were not against the occupation, the initial call for a strike and demonstrations does seem to have gained significant momentum after Netanyahu’s cabinet voted earlier this month to occupy the entire Gaza Strip, including all of Gaza City. This is largely because such an escalation of the war would almost certainly involve bombing raids in places where some of the hostages may still be held.
Despite this, the central trade unions of Israel, including Histadrut, which represents the majority of unionized Israeli workers, refused to support the call for a strike. However, they were nonetheless forced to grant their members freedom of action due to the pressure of the situation and the growing discontent with the actions of Netanyahu’s government.
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In response, Israeli government ministers condemned the demonstrations, some of which were heavily repressed by the police, claiming they were supporting Hamas. This is the same argument they repeatedly use whenever they are questioned about the genocide they are carrying out in Gaza.
As La Izquierda Diario reported:
Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that public pressure to secure a ceasefire agreement is actually “burying hostages in tunnels and seeking to push the State of Israel to surrender to its enemies and jeopardize its security and future.” The far -right Smotrich is one of the cabinet members most insistent on wiping out the entire Palestinian population in Gaza, no matter what. Along with the settlers, he advocates for a total occupation of the Strip and the establishment of settlements to complete the policy of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian population that began more than 70 years ago. He is pursuing the same policy in the West Bank, where he has just announced the creation of new settlements that will ultimately fragment the territory, seeking the definitive expulsion of the Palestinians.
While it is tempting to see these protests as a rebuke of such genocidal plans, most Israelis continue to support the proposals, at least in the abstract. In fact, recent polls have shown that 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support the forced expulsion of Gazans to other states, with more than half of those saying they were “very supportive” of the idea. Meanwhile, 56 percent of Jewish Israelis support the forced expulsion of Arab Israelis from Israel. While not reflecting the positions of everyone in the state of Israel, these polls nonetheless reveal the racist rot at the core of the Zionist project, which is unfortunately deeply embedded in Israeli society.
The genocide may be slowed down by the self-interest of those who want to see the hostages brought home, but it will not and cannot be stopped by the people of Israel exclusively, who by and large continue to support the oppression of the Palestinians. That said, the contradictions we are witnessing inside Israel, of which these protests are just one example, are nonetheless a positive sign precisely because they have the potential to destabilize the regime and open space for a clearer anti-Zionist pole within the state.
Ultimately, however, the only way to put an end to the genocide and the occupation and to provide for the liberation of the Palestinians is through a massive global socialist and anti-imperialist movement capable of forcing Israel’s imperialist supporters to end their funding of the genocide, and eventually delivering a military defeat of the IDF.
