My dear late brother Menachem would go out to protest over every military operation in Gaza. All he needed was for the operation to be announced and he was out there protesting against it. Menachem knew that the Zionist left at the time wouldn’t join him in his protest. He wasn’t looking for fake supporters. He wanted to exercise his right and that of his handful of colleagues to express their opposition.
He and I always disagreed, because as I saw it, what was important was not assuaging my conscience by chanting against the occupation and its consequences. The question was whether we had it in our power to generate public support – which is essential to achieving political goals.
The current protest in Israel isn’t against the occupation or even against the establishment of an apartheid state, which is happening before our eyes. That’s aggravating to many supporters of the protest who believe that it’s ignoring a despicable, plundering, abusive Israel.
But the leaders of the protest, Shikma Bressler and her colleagues, are correct in excluding the occupation – as a banner – from the protests against the regime coup. If you want to attract most of the public to the protest, there is no alternative to uniting around a limited common denominator on which a large number of people will agree.
Bressler and her colleagues are a source of pride. Rather than glorifying the protests of the “old days” and recycling them, they have been trying to stop the coup. The means at their disposal, when it comes to preventing the Knesset from passing the Levin-Rothman bills, are meager because the legislation is an expression of a 64-MK coalition of dark forces that have joined together.
Ask Benjamin Netanyahu, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and Yariv Levin. It would be their fondest wish to have the protest directed against the occupation, against the killing of Arabs, against a forgiving attitude toward the so-called hilltop youth, against the spirit coursing through the veins of this government of destruction.
I also assume that Bressler’s critics on the enlightened left would agree with me that every brick that is removed from the structure of Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s coup would interfere with the plans that Bezalel Smotrich and his rabbis have in store – stealing a potential state from its legal residents.
The success of efforts to eliminate the courts’ reasonableness standard would turn creeping annexation into something much harsher, and influence the policies of cabinet ministers who are pressing for immediate annexation and the establishment of “Jewish supremacy.”
Bressler is trying to make use of the Israeli consensus that opposes the anti-democratic shift that is taking place under our noses. She and her colleagues know that all of the liberal democratic countries that have gone down the path of eradicating their judicial systems have become battered democracies controlled by a government-allied judiciary and a rigged media.
We cannot ignore the political truth. Meretz and the Labor Party have collapsed from within because public opinion has rejected their positions on the occupation. The standing of the purest left-wing, which despises the occupation, won’t change even if it holds its own demonstrations across the country on behalf of the population under occupation.
Bressler is correct. The terrible threat of creeping fascism has to be met by massive and determined protest – produced by closing ranks among those trying to maintain Israel’s status as a Jewish, democratic, liberal country – with a clear and shining warning sign. This is the price of mass solidarity protest.