A Protest That’s Drowning in Its Own Tears

There is a scale model of a Gaza tunnel in the middle of Tel Aviv.

I saw it last month when I was in Israel on the nine-month anniversary of the October 7 attack. The public plaza in front of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, known since the fall as “Hostages Square,” has become a place of commiseration for Israelis and a site of spontaneous works of public art. A long dining table with dozens of chairs and place settings, one for each of the hostages, takes up the center of the square. When I was there, the whole display, the plates and cups, were covered in gray dust, moldering. A giant red sculpture of an anatomical heart, the size of a car engine, was draped in chains. And everywhere were the names and photos of the kidnapped. One corner was dedicated to posters with the faces of some of the young women who were taken—Daniela, Agam, Romi. The age of one captive who had been 19 on October 7 was crossed out, and a 20 was scrawled in Sharpie.

But what really drew my attention was the tunnel. People lined up to walk through about 100 feet of a narrow concrete passageway, built to resemble the underground warrens of Gaza where some of the hostages are being held. I had to duck. It was dark, but I could see that the walls were covered in graffiti from visitors. Piped in through small speakers was the sound of shooting. When I got to the other side, I overheard someone say, “This is my fourth time,” as if they’d just taken a ride on Space Mountain.

The tunnel simulation had a purpose that was as Jewish as a Passover seder: Let us experience in some small measure their suffering. But it also felt icky, the desire to identify with the plight of the hostages turned into kitsch. And it left me saddened, not for the first or last time, by what has happened to Israeli society since October 7.

What I experienced on a brief visit—among, I should add, the cosmopolitan and liberal-minded of Tel Aviv—was a new psychological status quo: exasperation and helplessness. The murder of more than 1,000 Israelis should have been a political and social earthquake, a moment for foundational change, yet what has followed over nearly a year now is a pathological stasis. Nothing seems to shake the power of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme-right allies, and at the same time trauma—a word heard constantly—has frozen in place what was a growing liberal political constituency, trapping an entire society at the opening of that fake tunnel, doomed to enter again and again.

Every Saturday evening in Tel Aviv, there are protests. The streets fill with people walking from all directions carrying Israeli flags. Some head to Hostages Square, and most to Kaplan Street, the major thoroughfare that runs from the center of the city out toward the Ayalon Highway, which marks its periphery. So associated are the protests with this street that Israelis refer to those who attend as “Kaplanists.” There are other protests on Saturday evening as well, including a minuscule one on the edge of the main Kaplan rally that has a more explicitly leftist tone. One of the weekends I was there, those protesters, dressed mostly in black, were chanting that anyone who took part in military operations in Gaza was a “war criminal.” Another gathering, at the intersection of Kaplan and Begin Streets, is organized by a group of hostage families who demand Netanyahu’s resignation—and are opposed to other hostage families, normally found at Hostages Square, who try to avoid politics.

So many simultaneous protests—more than I got to see—and the two Saturdays I was in Tel Aviv, I wandered from one to another in the fading summer-evening light. This kind of “tour” was not uncommon, I was told, often through laughter—it’s like the old joke about the Jew discovered living on a desert island who has built two synagogues: one he can attend, and the other so he has a place he will never step foot in.

My family is Israeli, but I had not visited in many years, and I was heartened to see all this civic engagement by a part of the population that had seemed politically checked out during Netanyahu’s long reign. I went out on my first Saturday with my uncle and aunt, Zvika and Vered, who in their 60s now devote a considerable amount of time to activism, especially Zvika. He takes part in the Kaplan protests but also in the more aggressive acts of civil disobedience, such as blocking traffic with his body and setting fires on highways. He’s been manhandled by the police, which is hard to imagine, because Zvika is 6-foot-3 and broad shouldered, with a Tom Selleck mustache: not a man you’d want to mess with, even at his age. He is not on the left—in fact, for years, when I was younger, I would wrangle with him about the occupation of the West Bank, the growing intransigence and power of the settlers, and what it all meant for a potential two-state solution. He would dismiss my concerns as the overreactions of his bleeding-heart American nephew. On this trip, he didn’t argue with me like that anymore.

One morning, drinking coffee in his backyard in Rishon LeZiyyon, a suburb of Tel Aviv, he described the country’s current crossroads: If nothing changes—that is, if Netanyahu and the extreme right he has empowered get their way—Israel will become an ever more theocratic place, run by people who believe that the whole land was granted by God to the Jewish people. This will lead to a brain drain of those who cannot abide living there anymore. In short order, Israel will find itself a poorer, more autocratic country, stuck in endless war. Even he could imagine leaving if this came to pass.

The alternative to this nightmare demands first and foremost that Netanyahu step down. Elections can then be held, and Zvika believes these will bring about a rearrangement of the current political players, maybe under the prime ministership of a relatively more sane center-right leader such as Naftali Bennett. But the election after that is the one Zvika is looking forward to—the one when a new generation of politicians will take over and finally shore up Israel’s institutions, including the government ministries and the legal system, so that they can’t be so easily torn down again.

This fight for a liberal and democratic vision of Israel is in the muscle memory of the Kaplan protesters. They recall the extraordinary thing they achieved in March of last year, when Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition tried to pass a law that would have diminished the power of the Supreme Court—the only real check on the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament. The silent majority that my uncle belongs to asserted itself. Its members saw a coup, and worried that their country was being taken away from them, and they came out to the streets. When Netanyahu announced in late March 2023 his intent to fire Yoav Gallant, his defense minister, who had expressed opposition to the reforms, by some estimates nearly a million people, a tenth of the entire population, protested; the country’s largest labor union declared a national strike, and the universities and even the airport shut down. Netanyahu relented, delaying the bill. And the protests continued, Saturday after Saturday, Israeli flags waving, sometimes drawing 200,000 people, determined to keep it up until the law was entirely discarded. Then came the shock of Hamas’s attack on October 7. The protests have continued—same time, same place—but they are not the same.

Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at Hebrew University who is close to the protest movement’s leaders, described to me what was lost on October 7, besides a sense of security. The unrelenting demonstrations against the judicial overhaul had become, she said, a “civic resistance movement”—an “ideological project” to counter the right’s national religious view of Israel as exclusively a Jewish state with one insisting that it was always meant to be, and would be, Jewish and democratic.

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The right tried to label the protesters anarchists and internal enemies, but the demonstrators claimed all the patriotic symbols—the flags, the national anthem—and branded the right as messianic extremists instead. Israelis grew more aware of the explicit project to dismantle the country’s secular and liberal institutions. Talshir pointed around the Jerusalem café where we were sitting and said, “You can now ask anyone in here and they will be able to give you a good description of why checks and balances matter in a political system.”

If October 7 hadn’t happened, she is certain that an election would have been held and this coalescing liberal camp would have found political expression at the ballot box. But the war, rather than creating a political rupture, seemed instead to turn back the clock, giving Netanyahu and the right the chance to frame anyone who criticized him as a dove and a leftist—maybe the most pejorative words an Israeli politician can use and part of Netanyahu’s well known playbook. So effective was Netanyahu at delegitimizing this revived liberal camp, portraying it as extremist—even attacking the hostage families who took part in the protests—that the resistance has lost its edge, and is now much further from political power than it was before the war began.

The first time I joined the Kaplan protests, I had the sensation of being present at a ritual. The crowd was louder and more defiant than the one milling around, downcast, at Hostages Square, but it was hardly bursting with spontaneity; from the number of gray ponytails I saw, it also skewed older. The gestures and chants all seemed well rehearsed—many people came prepared with orange earplugs; volunteer paramedics placidly circled the crowd. By my second time there, the whole experience, compacted into a convenient hour and a half (after which the cafés and restaurants filled up again), felt like a reading from a well-known liturgy.

The speakers included almost exclusively families of captives or of those who had been killed on October 7, and their demands did not stray from three central points: free the hostages, evict Netanyahu, hold new elections. Each speaker seemed to address Netanyahu personally, as if they were yelling at a vagrant uncle who had done something unspeakable, like molested someone in the family. “Our eyes are all on you! Don’t you try and get out of your responsibility!” A sister of someone killed at the Nova Music Festival punctuated her speech with this refrain, directed at Netanyahu: “Why are you still here and they aren’t?” About looking into the eyes of the mother of children who were killed: “Why are you still here and their children aren’t?” “Where does your courage come from?” she asked, as though seeking to understand the leader’s psychology. I had the feeling that these speeches were part of a well-established pattern, with an incantatory quality that crescendoed into a tearful shout: “Enough already!” “We want a deal now!” “We can’t take it anymore!”

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I walked down Kaplan toward the separate gathering organized by the politically active hostage families, and the ritualism became even more pronounced. The name of each captive was called out, and after each one, the crowd shouted “Now!” The Israeli writer Etgar Keret later told me that he thought the word now had become the amen of the secular population. A man climbed to the top of a bus shelter with a giant menorah and held it up with candles blazing. A father spoke to the crowd about his son who was taken from the music festival and then died in Gaza while a captive (a 26-year-old named Guy, whom he referred to with a Hebrew diminutive as Guychuk), and when he was done speaking, a recording of their last phone call on October 7 was played over the loudspeaker. The crowd of probably 20,000 or 30,000 lowered their heads in silence as the voice boomed, a man telling his father he loved him for the last time.

If the protest was a ritual, it was one of self-soothing, a release of rage and grief, maybe an expiation of guilt. I couldn’t imagine it denting Netanyahu in any way, nor could I fathom how people did this every single week without getting emotionally depleted. But then, as Talshir told me, Israel’s protest culture is relatively new, dating to around 2011, when demonstrations took place over the cost of living. And any time a group of civilians comes together like this, it is a sign of extraordinary commitment to a society’s well-being.

Still, I wondered if Israel’s current protests weren’t a kind of deflection. I heard hardly any mention of the war itself (though the deal many are demanding would necessitate a cease-fire with Hamas) or of Palestinians (whose suffering, though only a few miles away, is completely absent from Israeli media). The signs and speeches (“Enough!”) were reactive in tone and stayed within the bounds of the hostage issue and Netanyahu’s guilt, without articulating a larger argument about how a different kind of leadership might handle the threats facing the country or presenting any real alternative vision for the future. They didn’t take Netanyahu’s government to task for its record on security, or its attempt to “manage the conflict” over the past 20 years by ignoring the Palestinians—all the policies and thinking, that is, that led directly to October 7.

The leaders of the protests have chosen this tack as the best way to keep up the pressure for new elections. They are intent on avoiding any rhetoric that might get them labeled leftists. But this choice comes at a price. I spoke with Assaf Sharon, a philosophy professor at Tel Aviv University, the founder of the pro-democracy think tank Molad, and another consultant to the movement’s leaders. “Since October 7,” he told me, “myself and others have been pleading literally almost in tears with the leadership of the protest movement to make the case to the Israeli people that October 7 was not an accident; it was not just a fuckup. It was the inevitable result of the right-wing strategy. And it’s easy to make this case.”

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Fear of alienating the center and “soft right,” Sharon said, kept these leaders from directly addressing what led to the catastrophe or critiquing the conduct of the war. But this has also prevented the protests from exceeding what Sharon said was a 200,000-to-300,000-person ceiling. “People are deeply concerned or anxious,” he said. “They are afraid for their kids’ lives; they don’t see a future. And you cannot expect them to go to a protest that doesn’t address this issue. You cannot avoid talking about the war at a time of war and try to gain momentum.” The hostages, truly an issue of concern, are nevertheless a kind of “evasion tactic,” he said. Rather than making a strong political argument, he said, the protest leaders have chosen to cleave to a consensus of collective mourning, mixed with direct animus toward Netanyahu himself. “Why don’t they say that Netanyahu is failing the war? Why are we losing to Hamas? The big IDF is losing to a mid-level terrorist organization. Isn’t that a disgrace? Nobody’s willing to say it. And it’s not about Bibi. It’s not personal. It’s about a strategy, and it’s about a worldview.”

After only a few days in Tel Aviv, I saw Eden Yerushalmi in a dream. She is one of the many young hostages taken from the massacre at the Nova Music Festival. Like those of the other captives, her face is everywhere—a photo in which she stares out shyly, her dark hair falling over one side of her face. It took no time for her to enter my subconscious.

The streets are filled with posters and flyers and bumper stickers. Every tree and lamp post and bus bench. Most people can reel off the names of dozens of hostages. On television, they are invoked constantly and in the most unlikely ways. On Israel’s version of MasterChef, one of the judges cooked a meal with a father of a hostage. Dancing With the Stars regularly dedicates routines to them. A library I passed displayed each hostage’s most beloved book.

Israelis should continue fighting and not let up until they are all returned home. That people have devoted so much worry, and so much effort, to the fate of their neighbors is a sign of the society’s essential humanism. But I can’t help feeling that the fetishization and martyrology that I witnessed in Israel has become a psychological block, and paradoxically one that is preventing the coalescing of the sort of political power that might actually help get the hostages released. Because that is what is needed more than ritual: brute political power.

In the weeks since I left Israel, Netanyahu has managed to evade again and again the reckoning that signing a hostage deal would force upon him. A cease-fire would be opposed by his extreme-right coalition partners, causing the collapse of his government (and the end, most likely, of his political career). The recent assassination in Tehran of the political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, offered Netanyahu yet another reprieve, scrambling what was a moment of increased pressure and criticism from his own security chiefs to sign a deal to end the conflict. With Israel and Iran now seemingly on the brink of open warfare, Netanyahu once again has a case to make that this is not a time for political tumult. The wiliness and luck of this leader, who somehow still holds all the cards, is deranging to most Israelis, more than 70 percent of whom want him to immediately resign. The protest movement has supplied an emotional-release valve, but it has done very little to capitalize on this.

What worried me most, during my Saturday-night tours of Tel Aviv, were the conversations with protesters when I asked them what would happen to the weekly massings, the anger and concern and sense of active citizenship, if their desperate demands finally came true—the hostages freed, Netanyahu gone. There would be relief, most everyone told me, extraordinary relief. What would come next, I asked, for Israel’s liberal camp? Blank stares.