- MELANIE PHILLIPS - APRIL 21, 2023 -
Israel’s three-month-old protest movement, which has repeatedly brought tens of thousands into the streets, is now crossing an increasing number of red lines.
The battle is existential and reflects a similar struggle in the west
There are serious anxieties that protests will disrupt next week’s Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Independence Day ceremonies.
At a Holocaust Remembrance Day synagogue service this week, anti-government participants forced Likud MK Boaz Bismuth to leave after they shouted at him to get out and started to become physically violent.
The leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, announced that because the government had “divided society” he would boycott the traditional torch-lighting ceremony that ends Memorial Day and opens Independence Day.
It was hitherto unthinkable that Israelis could desecrate those three sacred days. It was similarly unthinkable for soldiers of the IDF to refuse to serve their country, as did a group of elite Air Force pilots in protest against the government.
Even the memory of the Shoah is being traduced. On an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to New York on Holocaust Remembrance Day, the pilot announced: “Things like [the] Holocaust are potentially carried [out] in a dictatorship, and we are fighting in Israel to remain a democratic country.”
On the same day, in another obscene equivalence, a ceremony at the Mateh Asher Regional Council displayed pictures from the Holocaust alongside photographs from the protests.
It should be apparent to rational observers that this has gone way beyond the issue of judicial reform. That particular agenda is now all but dead in the water. The government has retreated. Yet the protests are not only continuing but are becoming increasingly disturbing.
This is because judicial reform is a flashpoint for profound divisions that have previously escaped attention but have now erupted.
The Israeli protests are being fed by several different agendas. Some people oppose the judicial reforms because they believe the judiciary provides the only check on political power. Some want to bring down Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Some are frightened by religious or nationalist extremists in the government.
The deeper reason, one that connects all of the above, is secular Israel’s onslaught against Jewish religiosity in the public square.
For this, religious leaders bear significant responsibility. The reformist Orthodox Rabbi David Stav has warned that the extremism of the religious Zionist bloc has caused a dangerous rift in Judaism and Israeli society.
“Unfortunately,” he said, “some of our leaders, elected officials and rabbis speak in a tone that frightens many people in Israeli society — and rightfully so”.
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