Do you oust the man who is leading you in war?
This is a segment from The “End of Consensus?” Edition.
Now it’s time for our first discussion.
So, Allison, it looks like we’re finally going back into the politics of yes, BB, no BB.
Are we ready for this?
I’m not.
Are you?
Yeah, for lots of people, it felt like old times Saturday night at Habima Square, back when losing democracy was our biggest worry.
Very nostalgic for those times, aren’t you?
5,000 people, maybe more, gathered under pelting rain to demonstrate in favor of removing from office Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the grounds that he is a corrupt, lying, failed leader.
This, almost exactly 11 months after people gathered in the pelting rain at Habima Square, barely a week after Minister of Justice Yairiv Lavine announced his planned “judicial reform” to call for the removal from office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the grounds that he is a corrupt, lying, failed leader.
Those protests moved from Habima Square to Kaplan Street.
They doubled, they redoubled, they redoubled again in size until between 100 and 200,000 people were coming out every Saturday night, week in, week out, all until Hamas’s rampage through the kibbutzim, Moshe Bim, and towns surrounding Gaza on October 7th shut them down and for a time shut down to the very idea of protesting against the Prime Minister and the ruling government that was directing the war in Gaza that has now ground on for almost three months.
Protesting them seemed, almost by consensus, for quite a long time to seem unpatriotic and unseemly.
Well, that near consensus is now unraveling.
Four weeks ago, Hadass Rogolsky, an activist leader and spokeswoman for the feminist group Bonot Alternativa, Women Creating an Alternative, posted an announcement on social media of a Saturday night demonstration under the banner “The Time is Now,” meaning now is the time to go back into the streets to protest for Netanyahu’s ouster.
The first week, a couple hundred people came, then a thousand, then two thousand, and last week somewhere between five and ten thousand.
This is one sign that the message seems to be catching on.
Another sign is that the lead editorial of Haaretz on Christmas Day this week was headlined “Dethrone King Bibi Now.
” The article says that “Conditions have matured for the protest against Netanyahu to be resumed.
Yes, now.
Yes, now, during a war.
Especially during a war.
There is nothing more warranted than deposing him.
” The editorial goes on to say that Netanyahu was terrible before the war, that it is only because of him that Hamas managed to kill more than 1,200 innocent people on October 7th, that it’s his fault that the army and state institutions responded so slowly and badly to the attack, and it is his fault that the war is not going well.
The editorial ends with this, “The bringer of ruin cannot be the one to bring the remedy.
The time has come to demand from the one who wrought disaster on the State of Israel to vacate his throne and allow others the chance to repair what he has destroyed.
” Now, not everyone agrees, including people who have no love for Benjamin Netanyahu.
In a primetime address, President Itzhak Herzog said that returning to divisive protests is the worst thing we can do at this moment.
He said, “The enemy is waiting to see chasms among us, for us to start fighting with one another.
It sees the confrontations, the ego battles, and the political head-butting.
It celebrates every time disagreement drives us apart.
We must not return to the discourse of October 6th, of us and them.
Anyone who returns us to the discourse of October 6th harms the war effort and citizen security.
I am directly addressing the leadership and anyone in the public and political spheres demanding that you stop.
Show responsibility, restrain yourselves, and wait a little longer with the political campaigns and messages.
” How long, though, we ask, is a little longer.
Linda, the question that a lot of people are asking themselves at this tense moment, when it seems like the protests are about to start up, is simply, “Should they do it?
” Is President Herzog right that going back to the “Yes, Netanyahu, no Netanyahu” polarization that seemed to be ripping the country apart before October 7th would be a disaster for the war effort and, more generally, for the country?
So I’m really torn about this because, on one hand, I do respect what President Herzog said, and I think if there is a silver lining to this war, it is that there has been a unity and a sense of togetherness in Israel that hasn’t been here for a long time.
It seems to me that it’s almost like what it must have been at the beginning of Israel, where strangers are talking to each other and people are helping each other and people are just being a little bit kinder.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s less beeping in the streets even.
People are letting people cut in front of them without going ballistic.
People are, if you wait more than a nanosecond when the light turns green, nobody is.
And there’s something, and the whole volunteer effort of what’s been going on, of making cookies for soldiers and halot, and this whole, it’s just been really something quite incredible to see, and it would be kind of sad to lose that.
At the same time, I think that protesting is part of life in a democracy, and the protests, we’ve talked about this before, had a tremendous amount of energy.
Yet, to go the other way, there are people who say that those protests are one of the things that encouraged Hamas to launch October 7th, saying that they’re so disunified and Israel is just falling apart and that this is the time to launch this attack that we’ve been trying for.
I’m also a little concerned that, will it be clear what people are protesting?
In other words, are they protesting Netanyahu’s conduct of the war?
Are they protesting the fact that there are still 120 hostages in Gaza?
Are they protesting the fact that Netanyahu has refused to take responsibility for his conduct in the war, unlike other senior Israeli officials like the chief of staff and the defense minister?
I think it’s also, is it going to be clear exactly what people are protesting?
In short, I’m basically very torn about this.
I feel the same way.
I think that it would be clear to most people what the protests would be like if I correctly understand them.
I’m friends with this Hadass woman who is organizing the protests.
She were running together for city council here in Tel Aviv, so I’ve gotten to know her a bit over the past months.
I think that what she is about and what these protests, if you actually go to them, which I have not, what they are about is saying we were right before October 7th that Netanyahu has to go.
October 7th and what followed on the 8th, the 9th, the 10th, and up until today is just further proof of both how right we were and how important it is that we were right in claiming that Netanyahu needs to be swapped out and that it’s important in a way that just can’t wait, that he’s handling everything poorly in part because he is never able to separate his decisions as a leader from his political decisions, which are aiming to keep him in his seat as leader.
He is overly willing to sacrifice the common good for his own personal political good.
I think that that would be the message.
Watching the videos, that was a message of the big, very impressive demonstration.
I mean, 5,000 to 10,000 people and what was really like lots of rain.
It was a sea of umbrellas and still people were soaked and it was really cold.
I think that that’s what they were saying.
All I can say about it is I do not have the stomach for it myself.
I can’t bring myself to go to it.
I can’t bring myself to think of my kid fighting in Gaza and me in Tel Aviv protesting against his commander in chief.
I can’t think of further exacerbating the lack of faith that people have in their government at this moment when again, the government is deciding who is going to live and who’s going to die being people like our kids, but also being tens of thousands of people in Gaza or thousands of more people in Gaza or hopefully fewer than that will die in the future, but anyway, lots of people.
I just don’t have the stomach for it and yet when somebody like Hadass says to me, “We’ll all be better off, fewer people will die in the long run if we do this, if we just fight and succeed,” then I say, “Maybe that’s true.
” I mean, I don’t see how you succeed.
I don’t see how you get rid of Netanyahu at this moment, but maybe you’re right.
And so then all I’m left with is I personally just don’t have the stomach for it.
So I’m interested, Noah, are you, while it is completely understandable, I mean, I’ve had trouble, I’ve said before, talking politics to my friends who have sons in the army because when you criticize the government and when you, you know, these are their kids’ lives in their hands, so I have trouble making it, and my friends have indicated to me they kind of don’t want to discuss it, so I haven’t discussed it with them.
So while it’s completely understandable that you don’t want to go, are you glad and supportive of the fact that people like Hadassah are doing this?
You know, if I don’t have a kid in the game and I’m deciding whether to go, would you say like, “Yeah, Alison, I really, you know, I don’t want to go, but I think it would be great if you went,” or, “I don’t think you should go.
” Like, how do you feel about other people doing it?
Well, I feel like what Linda was saying at the beginning of what you said, Linda, about how there is something beautiful and rare and precious and actually important, including politically important, about this sense of unity.
So to me, it’s not at all clear that I’m not, that it will be for the better if this takes off, and I remember what it was like up in, leading up to October, just how divisive things were and how like, how the social media was filled with like anger and hatred and hurt, and so I, so no, I do not, like my gut says not, “Don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this now,” but if somebody says, “Does that mean you think that it’s wrong?
” Then I don’t necessarily think that, like I think that it’s a mistake.
I think I might be mistaken about thinking that it’s a mistake.
I think that people who want to do it, want to do it for reasons that I think are good and patriotic.
I don’t think there’s any question of anyone being unpatriotic here.
So I’m pretty humble about the fact that I just want to curl up in a ball and say, “No, no, no, no, no.
” I think it’s interesting that, first of all, it’s hard to separate, again, what you’re demonstrating for, and it just feels like one big, “Are we demonstrating because we want the hostages to be the first priority?
” There are a lot of pro-hostage demonstrations, and there are— Those demonstrations I go to, by the way, that feels different to me.
And on the far left, I think there are now, is bubbling up perhaps anti-war demonstrations that this thing is not being thought—in the style of Lebanon, where are we going?
What’s the end game?
Which I also might go to, which also doesn’t feel the same as, “Yes, BB, no BB to me.
” The BB demonstrations, I think, given the fact that we’re not going to elections anytime soon and that those who dare to do polls are showing poll after poll after poll how low his support is.
And again, this is also influenced by me just having been abroad, where it’s very hard for people to separate these things out.
But they think that because the vast majority of Israelis are supporting the war effort, that means that—and Netanyahu is leading the war effort—that they support Netanyahu, which no poll bears out.
His support has just dropped dramatically and terribly.
So it is a way of visibly showing to ourselves, to the world, that even though we’re united and we stand together in this cause, that we are also increasingly united in our feelings that BB shouldn’t be the one at the helm of it, and that we don’t support him, that we don’t trust him, and that we don’t believe him.
So it is, in a way, I think, sending out an important message that maybe needs to be stated.
Just to agree with that, Alison, you know, everybody says, “Oh, well, after the war, BB can no longer remain as prime minister.
” But, you know, I’m not sure that’s true.
He has not accepted responsibility.
He doesn’t show any sign of willingly going anywhere.
So maybe these protests are a way of people saying, “We don’t want him as prime minister anymore.
” And when is after the war these days?
It was one thing like, “Okay, let’s wait a few weeks for the war to end.
Let’s wait some months for the war to end.
” You know, we don’t know how long this is going to last.
And sadly, that is part of the controversy, is that Netanyahu does not have a political interest in wanting the war to end, because that is exactly when the chickens will come home to roost.
Heads will roll.
