Indeed, the battle between the protesters and the government, which has now been raging for three months, is unlikely to de-escalate. On Wednesday, despite the announced “pause,” one of the coalition’s most controversial pieces of legislation — granting the government near-complete control over the appointment of judges — was brought before the Knesset. The MKs claimed that this was nothing more than a “technical procedure,” and that they have no intention of putting it to a vote before the current parliamentary session ends next week.
The protest leaders are rejecting this excuse. “Contrary to what Netanyahu, Simcha Rothman, and Itamar Ben Gvir think, the people who took to the streets are not naive,” they wrote in a public message on Monday. “We will not let dictatorial laws pass.” They further called on the Knesset’s opposition parties to recognize that any negotiations with the prime minister over the legislation were merely part of a “theater show by the dictator Netanyahu.”
The government, for its part, is preparing to confront the protesters even more aggressively. Coalition members, including National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, have threatened to resign if Netanyahu gives in to the protesters’ demands. To appease his Kahanist partner and to buy himself time, Netanyahu signed an agreement pledging to establish a “national guard” that will be overseen directly by Ben Gvir’s office. “The national guard will defend our farmers from agricultural terror, equipment burning, theft, and protection … and will arrive at every location which, in previous years, has been deemed beyond the jurisdiction of the State of Israel,” Ben Gvir said.
There is no doubt, however, over what the real goal of this national guard is. Minutes after the deal was announced, Kobi Shabtai, the Israeli police commissioner, was overheard shouting into his cellphone: “He [Netanyahu] gave Ben Gvir a militia!” The protest leaders were similarly under no illusions: “The terrorists of Ben Gvir and Smotrich will be rebranded and given new weapons from the state. [They] are dragging us into civil war.”
The weekly nationwide demonstrations are thus set to continue on Saturday. But the skepticism of the government’s next moves has not diminished the protesters’ sense of achievement.
What has temporarily stopped the coalition’s onslaught is, first and foremost, the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Be’er Sheva, and dozens of other localities for the past three months. This week, those protesters blocked Tel Aviv’s Ayalon Highway, set up burning barricades, and were unafraid to stand up to the police. Without their confrontations and insistence on disrupting the daily routine, the protest would not have garnered the local and international momentum it now has. Now, a new demand, however hazy, has begun to emerge from the protests that is even more ambitious than merely canceling the overhaul or ousting the government: the demand for a “constitution and equality.”
In an attempt to undermine the new balance of power on the streets, the Israeli right is starting to take to the streets in the tens of thousands, particularly in Jerusalem, where most of the government’s supporters are settlers and religious Zionists. Some of them have already been violent: Channel 13 reporter Yossi Eli said that members of La Familia, the racist “ultra” fans of Beitar Jerusalem soccer club, assaulted him at the Jerusalem demonstration, breaking his ribs and damaging his spleen. Reporter Tamer Alkilani and cameraman Avi Kashman, both from the Arabic-language channel of Kan, Israel’s Public Broadcasting Corporation, were also violently attacked.
In Tel Aviv, a few hundred right-wing activists turned out in a counterprotest to the anti-government movement at the Azrieli Junction. They held up signs reading “64” – a reference to the 64 Knesset members in the coalition — and Israeli flags on which they wrote the word “transfer” in Hebrew, apparently attempting to reclaim the flag which they see as “co-opted” by the protesters.
On the other side, hundreds of anti-government protesters gathered chanting “Ben Gvir is a terrorist.” They tried to push back the aggressive right-wing activists, but police, including some mounted on horses, intervened. Some of the right wingers then marched toward the neighborhood of Sarona, attacking more anti-government protesters with pepper spray while throwing objects at them.
The violence did not only come from right-wing activists. Regardless of Commissioner Shabtai’s resentment of the ruling politicians, the police clearly wanted to prevent the protesters from entering the Ayalon Highway, with plainclothes officers attacking the demonstration with water cannons, horses, and stun grenades. Acting in the spirit of Ben Gvir, both the police and the right are set on stopping the protest movement at any cost. The protesters have made it clear that they will not surrender so easily.
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