Israeli Protesters Have Chosen Their Villain

This weekend, Israel withdrew all but one of its brigades of ground forces from Gaza. Israel announced that the withdrawal was happening but did not announce what it meant. Surely it was not due to the “total victory over Hamas” that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said was the primary criterion for a successful mission. After all, Israel was negotiating with Hamas in Cairo as recently as today, and there would be no point in negotiating with a defunct enemy. Last I checked, the Wikipedia entry on Hamas is still written in the present tense.

The withdrawal, which coincides with the six-month anniversary of the October 7 atrocities, could indicate that the negotiators in Cairo are close to a tentative deal. The broad outlines of a potential deal are widely supposed to be a trade of 40 Israeli hostages for a few weeks’ cease-fire and increased flow of humanitarian aid. Israel’s withdrawal could be a face-saving measure to preempt the deal, to avoid the impression of sudden and hasty retreat as part of a concession to Hamas. Reporting from yesterday, however, casts grim doubt on these possibilities: Hamas claims not to have enough living hostages to fulfill its end of the bargain. (At least, not enough hostages old enough, young enough, or female enough to be eligible for freedom, under Hamas’s criteria.) Another possibility is more mundane: The Israelis need a break. In the areas they have invaded, they may also have run out of places to attack. No professional army wants to stand around waiting for its enemy to make a move. As a U.S. Marine officer once told me in Iraq, “When you run out of targets, you become one.”

Whatever the specific meaning of this withdrawal, it does seem that the six-month mark has brought with it a crucial moment, or at least a pause for Israel’s leadership to take fresh stock of the grotesque situation in the region. During protests in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem this weekend, the global condemnation of Israel’s tactics in Gaza didn’t seem to matter to anyone I spoke with. But Israelis’ rage against their own country’s government, so hapless and adrift, had reached new levels of incandescence.

[Read: Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s worst prime minister ever]

Recall that even before the war, the country’s secular left had been protesting in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu’s attempts to reform the judiciary. That reform would have limited judges’ ability to put a check on the right-wing government. Back then, the crowds chanted against Netanyahu because they thought he was dragging Israel toward authoritarianism. Now he and his supporters are jeered, hissed at, and reviled not for what they might do tomorrow but for their catastrophic incompetence right now, and for allegedly preserving their own power at the expense of Israeli life. Many Israelis have been horrified by the deaths of Palestinian civilians, but in the protests, I heard relatively few voices expressing that concern (and none who mourned the dead Hamas combatants).

The crowds had chosen their villain. Netanyahu had made everything worse, they said. He presided over the original intelligence failure of October 7—an error that, all by itself, makes him the worst leader in Israel’s history. He is, according to his critics, running not a government but an anti-government, so stocked with nobodies and incompetents that it is almost as if Israel has no government at all. His every move since October has been marked by indecision and cynicism. In lieu of statesmanship and productive diplomacy (Netanyahu was once considered at least a capable manager of Israel’s international relations), they see empty pronouncements of resolve, and an unseemly terror at the possibility of upsetting his coalition and watching his government crumble.

Striking a deal with Hamas is understandably a delicate matter. It is also, even after accounting for the group’s inflexibility and tendency to walk away from negotiations, the only way that Israeli hostages have been brought home in significant numbers. Netanyahu’s government, rather than negotiate cannily and creatively, seems to have met that inflexibility with inflexibility of its own. It depends on the political support of ideologues who opposed the previous swap. Their intransigence goes well beyond the pitiless fight against terrorism, and includes a vision for a Gaza permanently rid of Palestinians. It is one thing to refuse to negotiate with extremists because they are extremists. It is another to refuse to negotiate with them because you are extreme too. The protesters have come to suspect that the latter has been holding up the hostage return as much as the former—and that they, as Israelis, cannot change Hamas, but they might be able to change their own government.

On Sunday night in Jerusalem, near the Knesset, the crowd of 50,000 protesters alternated between moroseness and fury. It was, especially for Jerusalem, a secular crowd. I stood next to two young women smoking a joint, which probably took the edge off the fury. All were united in leveling a charge against Netanyahu: that he would rather hold together his coalition of zealots than cut a deal, even one that would bring hostages home. The fury reached an apex when the mayor of Jerusalem, Moshe Lion, tried to speak. He is a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party but stuck to nonpartisan bromides. Still, the crowd shouted him down because of the association. When he persisted, one of the young women next to me took the joint out of her mouth and spat on the ground.

Netanyahu could extract a kind of disgusted gratitude from these protesters if he offered a deal with Hamas (and the group, in an uncharacteristically conciliatory mood, agreed to it). To some in the crowd, the terms of that deal seemed literally not to matter, because, as one sign read, NO PRICE IS TOO HIGH. Surely not everyone in the crowd would go that far. But the hooting and heckling suggested they thought that Netanyahu had empowered negotiators too little, and that he was ultimately responsible for securing a deal, even a temporary one. In addition to repatriating hostages, a deal would allow time to negotiate a more durable peace and avoid a possible Gaza-as-Somalia scenario (lawlessness, warlordism, and endless civilian misery) if Israel continues to drift forward with no obvious plan.  

If accepting a deal imperils Netanyahu’s good graces on the right, rejecting a remotely plausible one would probably doom him and his government because of the wrath of the center and the left. They believe that more of the hostages—who have now spent six months in darkness or fending off rapists—would be home already if Netanyahu had told his more extreme colleagues to go pout. Right-wing support has long since reached its apex, and the government is already weak. Public outrage might finally destroy it. The question of who would replace it is, remarkably, almost an afterthought. Whoever comes next could not possibly be worse.