Have the protestors against Israel’s judicial overhaul gone too far?
An Israeli man holds the Israeli flag during a demonstration against the Israeli government on July 5, 2023 in Tel Aviv, Israel. The protests followed an announcement from Tel Aviv’s District Police Commander Ami Eshed that he was resigning from the police force after being ousted from his role by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai, allegedly on political grounds. Photo by Amir Levy/Getty Images
As I write this, I’m watching Israeli protesters flood Jerusalem and Tel Aviv’s streets in the middle of the night, prompted by yet another incomprehensible move by Israel’s government. After withstanding months of pressure from National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to crack down on Israelis protesting against judicial reform, Tel Aviv’s District Police Commander Ami Eshed announced his resignation on July 5, citing his “choice to avert a civil war.”
It’s quite an astonishing phenomenon, if you think about it. Israel’s government launched an unprecedented attack on the country’s judiciary, prompting nationwide protests. In response, the national security minister pressured Israeli police to take extreme measures against demonstrators, and when he failed, forced the man responsible for rebutting his demands out of his job. The response? Thousands of Israelis waving the country’s flag took to the streets in a show of support for Eshed.
But as inspiring as these protesters are, and despite their profuse love for the Jewish state, it’s hard not to be concerned by the direction in which they have headed. While the Netanyahu government’s judicial reforms may indeed harm Israeli democracy, protesters have continued to cross red lines that are not only weakening their movement’s impact, but hurting the very society they are defending.
From the moment opposition to the judicial reforms erupted in January, protesters have signaled their willingness to violate the norms of acceptable conduct in order to advance their agendas.
In January, Israeli payroll platform Papaya Global, which in 2021 was valued at $3.7 billion, announced it was withdrawing all of its money from Israel over the proposed legislation — a move aptly criticized by one investor as using “a bank account as a political bargaining chip.”
Attempts to hold Israel’s economy hostage have continued since. Last month, Nehemiah Dagan, the IDF’s former chief education officer and an active figure in the protest movement, suggested (in a since-deleted Facebook post) that “paralyzing the economy” should be the protests’ “next phase.” Such a move, he wrote, “will inevitably lead to violent clashes between the economy and the establishment that may well develop into a civil war.”
Unfortunately, such inflammatory rhetoric is not limited to the protest’s fringes. In April, protest leader Roee Neuman was questioned by police after threatening a police officer. The officer, who whipped a protester on Tel Aviv’s Ayalon Highway, “will sit in prison for many years,” Neuman tweeted, adding, “after he is released, we’ll chase him for many more years.”
More recently, writing in Haaretz on July 2, in what read more like a treatise from a radical activist than a leader looking to unite the public, protest leader Shikma Schwartzman-Bressler called for “an uncompromising struggle” against the current government. The next day, protesters swarmed Ben-Gurion Airport, blocking the main thoroughfare.
The message to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to the protest movement’s international spokesperson Josh Drill, was clear: “If you continue advancing the judicial overhaul we will shut down the country,” he tweeted. “We did it once and we will do it again.”
A mass protest movement for the good of the country needs to be led by moderates who want to unite, not radicals who refuse to compromise. Tragically, these tactics are also impairing discourse around security — the one issue Israelis have always viewed as sacred.
Last week, as Israel launched what appeared to be its largest counterterror campaign in the West Bank in 20 years, protest leaders rejected calls to halt demonstrations during the operation (granted, the government similarly refused to pause legislation). On July 4, when a Palestinian injured seven in a Tel Aviv car-ramming and stabbing attack, causing a pregnant woman to lose her child, Bressler, instead of calling for unity, retweeted a video from the scene of the attack in which a middle-aged man berated “leftist traitors.”
These developments’ significance should not be underestimated. “Not since 1983, when hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to protest Israel’s role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre,” former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren recently observed, “has the country been so divided in wartime.”
The protesters are right in calling this government a disgrace. So too should they be concerned by its proposed judicial reform. But at no point did that hand them a carte blanche to protest however, whenever and wherever they want. Rejecting compromise, threatening to shut down the country and blocking the airport (the latter of which very predictably provoked clashes with police) only serves to inflame tensions in an already dangerously polarized society.
Few scenes from Israel have been as inspirational of late as the hundreds of thousands of Israelis peacefully protesting week after week. Those images show a love for the country and an understanding that Israelis are bigger than any political dispute. Pulling stunts at Ben-Gurion Airport, on the other hand, appears to have little benefit other than to provoke.
And it’s hurting the protests. “They’re alienating the broader public that they need in order to have a political impact,” The Jerusalem Post’s diplomatic correspondent Lahav Harkov told me. “The reason the country was effectively shut down for a day in March was that you actually had 300,000 people participating in these actions.” Despite widespread opposition to the judicial reforms, many Israelis have no interest in joining a movement that blocks residential streets at 6:30 a.m. by burning tires and putting up barbed wire. “The average person is not up for that,” Harkov said.
Beyond such tactics’ immediate consequences, the protests have also set a dangerous precedent. If those opposed to judicial reform can shut down airports and shirk reserve duty, what’s to stop right-wing, religious Israelis from doing the same when they feel equally threatened by a future center-left government? The Pandora’s box of protests is open; it matters less “who started it” than whether the damage can be reversed.
Israel is at a perilous moment, and is being led by an unprecedentedly hardline and irresponsible government. But rather than fight one another, all signs point towards a strong desire in Israel for compromise. Even Yair Lapid — whom Harkov described as playing “the bad cop” in the opposition camp for his less conciliatory approach towards the coalition — declared on July 5 his willingness to make uncomfortable compromises in order to prevent the situation from deteriorating even further.
The protest movement’s leaders would do well to heed his warning. I wholeheartedly support attempts to prevent dangerous judicial reforms, but I fear the methods. Will Jewish history remember these protesters as brave citizens who saved democracy, or activists who lost their way and pushed Israel even closer to the abyss?
To contact the author, email [email protected].
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