If the uncompromising left had had its way, and the pro-democracy protest had turned into an anti-occupation movement, it would already have failed, and Netanyahu's judicial coup would already have won. And that wouldn't have helped the Palestinians at all
Fine, let’s take the advice of the hardline left bloc at the anti-coup demonstrations, the ones chanting “A nation that occupies another nation will never be free,” and make ending the occupation the primary, or at least a front-line, goal of the mass protests. What will happen?
For one, opposition leaders Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid and their supporters won’t be there anymore.
Neither, of course, will be the right-wing, Netanyahu-hating former defense minister Avigdor Lieberman and his camp. Neither will the retired leaders of the army, Mossad, Shin Bet and Israel Police, nor most of the reserve soldiers who have taken such an outsized role in the protest movement.
The whole center and moderate right wing of Israel will check out of the movement, and all that will be left is the Jewish left and some Arab citizens. Since 2006, when it became clear that the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza had not stopped the rocket fire by militants, this group has seen its anti-occupation, pro-peace demonstrations dwindle from hundreds of thousands to thousands, to hundreds, to nothing.
For years there have been no significant anti-occupation protests because hardly anyone still believes they’ll make a difference. In the Knesset and in the elections, first centrist Labor, then left-wing Meretz gave up on the cause. No protests, no political parties, not even a bumper sticker against the occupation can be seen anymore.
Yet this is the “force” that the ideological left wants to see leading the anti-coup protests. They want to take what is by leaps and bounds the biggest, most determined, most successful, most vital mass movement in Israeli history and attach it to a corpse.
I agree – this would be the most morally pristine thing to do. The occupation is the worst crime Israel is committing or ever has committed. It makes a bitter joke out of the claim that Israel is a democracy, making the protesters’ chant of dem-o-kratiya! fundamentally hypocritical. All true.
But the fight against the judicial coup is a political one, and politics is the “art of the possible,” and ending the occupation – as we have seen with growing clarity since 2006, as the settlers and their allies have steadily taken over the country while the “peace camp” has dried up and blown away – is just not possible anymore, except theoretically.
Ending the occupation means ending Israeli rule over the Palestinians, which, in the West Bank, means removing the IDF from their midst, which means removing hundreds of thousands of settlers from the West Bank.
Does that seem to be anywhere in the cards? Do you really want to wave that banner at the front of the anti-coup protests?
By contrast, ending the judicial coup only means getting the government to drop the judicial coup legislation. Just forget it, like it never happened. Nobody gets uprooted from their home, no redrawing of borders, no tens of billions in compensation, no turning Israel and the Middle East upside down. Just get the government to realize it made a mistake, lose the idea and move on.
And haven’t the protests made incredible progress toward accomplishing that goal? At this point, the question is whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has given up and plans to keep the coup’s legislative process slowly going nowhere just to stave off a revolt by his crazies, or if he still really intends to push this thing through. I think it’s the former.
Netanyahu isn’t crazy, this policy has reaped nothing but disaster for him on every front, the opposition to it isn’t fading away like he expected, and his crazies have nowhere to go if they leave his government. I think the protesters are en route to winning, the government is en route to losing and the judicial coup is en route to the dustbin of history.
But – the occupation is still here, and getting stronger all the time. The protests haven’t laid a glove on it. “The protest movement cannot continue to ignore the occupation, Ayman Odeh, an Arab lawmaker and head of the Hadash party wrote in Haaretz recently: “After all, the underlying reason for trying to shatter the justice system, civil society and the democratic boundaries is to give fascism a free hand in the territories, in order to perpetrate horrific crimes there without any interference.”
Exactly. Imagine how much worse things would get for the Palestinians if the protests had failed, the judicial coup had succeeded and the Supreme Court had been castrated as planned.
That’s what would have happened if the uncompromising left had had its way and the protest had turned into an anti-occupation movement, one that didn’t have all those big names from the security establishment and all those soldiers, one that most likely would not have chosen the Israeli flag as its symbol, one that Netanyahu could have successfully branded as “leftist.” If that had happened, the protest would have failed months ago.
The consequences would have been not only allowing the destruction of what remains of Israeli democracy, i.e. the democracy that the 9 million Israeli citizens living within the Green Line enjoy, but also allowing the occupation to rapidly get a whole lot worse.
And while the Palestinians were bearing the brunt of the judicial coup in the West Bank and Gaza, who would be its main victims in Israel proper? Arab citizens, of course. What would Ayman Odeh have said then?
I would love the occupation to end, and for Israel to be a full democracy, and I have a very strong hunch that most of the protest leaders would too.
But when the choice is so obviously between keeping the half-a-loaf that you’ve got and throwing it away for nothing, I’ll hang on to that half and thank God the protest movement, in its wisdom, chose just such a strategy.
Larry Derfner is an Israeli-American journalist and author. He works at Haaretz as a copy editor and has written for the U.S. News & World Report, (London) Sunday Times, +972 Magazine and many other publications. He is the author of two memoirs, “No Country for Jewish Liberals” (2017) and “Playing Till We Have to Go: A Jewish childhood in inner-city L.A.” (2020).