Israel’s government under Netanyahu falls apart during the war between Israel and Hamas
It was a wave of movement. What began in the spring of 1965, when 40 anti-war students at UC Berkeley burned a draft notice and shortly thereafter two people set themselves on fire, developed in the fall of 1969 into mass rallies that brought millions onto the streets, including 200,000 in San Francisco and 500,000 in Washington, DC
More than 200,000 Americans have since been charged with either evading the draft or sabotaging it. By 1970, students had attacked about 200 military recruiting offices on campus. In the spring of 1972, riots at Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton universities spread across the country. In 1975, the Americans left Vietnam.
It was a massive grassroots movement the likes of which the world had never seen, and the American government’s response was as impulsive and misguided as the war it did not know how to win.
What began with congressional investigations into alleged collaboration of American prisoners of war with North Vietnam led to police brutality, culminating in the shootings at Kent State University that killed four students and a rally in Los Angeles that left three dead.
Now, as war protests rock Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and police use increasing violence against demonstrators, the question arises: is there any analogy between the American past and the Israeli present? The answer is that in terms of the war at issue, there is no analogy at all—in fact, there is a contrast; but in terms of the energy, momentum, and steady convergence toward the end state of the protests, there certainly is.
The most obvious difference between American protests in the Vietnam era and Israel’s current protests is that our protests are not against the war. Our war is not against a distant nation that has done us no harm, as Americans rightly thought about Vietnam. We are at war against our immediate neighbors who have brutally attacked us.
The dilemma facing Israeli protesters, therefore, is not about the morality of the protests, but about their impact. Demanding the removal of a government waging a defensive war could harm the war effort itself, fear many who identify with the protests but are hesitant to protest while fighting rages in both the south and the north. This is a legitimate concern, but it is technical. Morally speaking, war does not override democracy, as Bar-Ilan University philosopher Avi Sagi noted in his essay “Wartime Protest: The Burning Question” (Hartman Institute, 2024, Hebrew). Moreover, “in times of war, it is the duty of citizens to stand guard and check that the state is fulfilling its moral and civic obligations,” wrote Sagi, a co-author of the Israel Defense Forces’ code of ethics.
The dramatic aspect lies not in the dilemma of the demonstrators, but in the violence to which they are exposed – physical, rhetorical and political.
Police violence during protests
This week, police beat, batoned and sprayed water on protesters outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s house in Jerusalem. One of the protesters, Dr. Tal Weissbach, a senior gynecologist at Tel Hashomer Hospital, was seriously injured in her left eye, which she might have lost.
The rhetorical answer is equally appalling.
Likud MP Nissim Vaturi called the protesters “the arm of Hamas.” The prime minister’s son accused the Israel Defense Forces’ general staff – the warriors who brave enemy fire day and night while he sunbathes in Miami – of seeking Israel’s defeat.
Shortly afterwards, the Prime Minister’s mouthpiece, Channel 14 commentator Yaakov Bardugo, accused Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi of seeking to maintain Hamas’s hold on power.
These burps all have a common pattern – blatant lies by well-placed Likudniks seeking to shift blame. They are an expression of panic – the same panic that the Nixon administration responded with when the Vietnam protests spiraled out of control.
And the panic was justified then, as it is now. That message was delivered this week by Likud lawmakers who, faced with the political violence of their own coalition, finally hit back at Netanyahu. Faced with the coalition’s plot to have Shas create hundreds of jobs for its cronies as city and district rabbis by transferring their positions from the municipalities to the government – a scandal today, but an abomination in wartime – Likud lawmakers and mayors were appalled and rebelled.
“Do not be complicit in this shameful law!” Dimona Mayor Benny Bitton admonished the deputies. “You should all be ashamed of yourselves,” Ashkelon Mayor Tomer Glam admonished the deputies. He asked them how they could spend time and money on such a project when his war-torn city, which lost 30 people in the current war, is crying out for reconstruction. “Why?” he asked.
The coalition’s response to Mayor Glam – “We don’t care about you and your sad city, we care about Shas” – came when Likud replaced the members of the Legal Affairs Committee who threatened to overturn the legislation.
But the protest movement, like the American one in the last century, developed a life of its own. The two rebellious Likud MPs were soon joined by five others, and the next morning Netanyahu repealed the law.
The end of an era?
Netanyahu believes there is a crack in his dam that he quickly discovered and patched up. He is wrong. What he is facing is the beginning of a long-overdue mutiny, fueled by the same energy as the protests in the streets: the belief that this war is umbilically linked to his corrupt establishment and the era that gave birth to it.
The United States’ Vietnam trauma had many causes, but a major one was a deformed draft system that favored the privileged and mistreated the rest.
Netanyahu’s conscription system is even worse. It is the core of the horse-thieves’ alliance that forms the backbone of his political skeleton. This is what Likud’s defectors now understand, what their leader will never admit, and what will ultimately bring him down.
The Likud defectors are now saying practically the same thing as the protesters on the streets: Israel needs a new beginning. And thanks to them, Israel will experience its new beginning – the fresh start that the Jewish state so obviously needs, that its people so loudly demand, and that its leaders rightly fear.
www.MittelIsrael.netThe author, a Fellow of the Hartman Institute, is the author of the best-selling book Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the political leadership of the Jewish people.
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