“A round of applause for all of us here. We are more than 100,000. "It is the largest demonstration since the war began!" he celebrated this Saturday from the stage, symbolically located - for the first time since the Hamas attack on October 7 - at the intersection in Tel Aviv that the City Council renamed Plaza Democracy because the protests against the judicial reform of then and now Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, converged there. It is the same mass of national flags, but with a different slogan (“Elections Now”) and a different context, which Shai Meidar, from the anti-government organization The Day After, summarized from the podium and called up, like 300,000 other reservists: “ Every day I live the contradiction of serving my country as a reservist under a Government that I do not trust and that conducts this war with an absolute lack of responsibility." Or as Lior Akerman, researcher and former high command of the intelligence services, described: “We are forced to fight against an external enemy and against the one whose role on October 7 was supposed to be to defend us.”
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They did not cry out against the war. In fact,
88% of Israeli Jews support it and more than half oppose the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza while there are hostages and advocate that the army use even more force. They did it against the management of Netanyahu, the man who has been in power the longest and whom Israelis love or hate, with no middle ground. More and more of the latter believe that it is artificially prolonging the war for political survival and take to the streets, with a mix of old slogans ("Bibi [Netanyahu], go home!") and new ones, such as "Pact now!" or Everyone now!”, to pay the price Hamas is asking for the 133 hostages left in Gaza. They are, above all, the same, but less numerous, and in the same city (Tel Aviv), who took to the streets against the judicial reform for nine months of 2023.
Their faces reflected the rarefied atmosphere in which Israel marks six months of war this Sunday. The collective emotion has been mutating. First, it was the surprise and sadness at the deadliest day in the country's history. The stories of cold-blooded murders and of civilians waiting for hours for the arrival of soldiers awakened all the ghosts of helplessness of the Holocaust. The euphoria over the destruction in Gaza followed, as a kind of redemptive revenge with a discourse of criminalization of civilians. Now there is a feeling of lack of direction and that Netanyahu has no plan other than to prolong the invasion as much as possible for mere political survival. The motto “Together we will win” continues to decorate buildings and illuminated signs everywhere, but it already sounds like an empty slogan.
First, the facts. Israel has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians (according to the Ministry of Health of the Hamas Government) and left half of Gaza in rubble and hundreds of thousands of people on the brink of famine, by using food as a weapon of war. It has buried its international image and lacks a realistic plan to end the war and the day after. International pressure has stopped the invasion of Rafah, which
announced more than a month ago, and still has some 130,000 citizens (more than 1% of the population) evacuated from the borders with Lebanon and Gaza without a clear horizon for their return.
His army - the most powerful in the Middle East - has not completed, however, a single objective: the return of all the hostages (133 remain and, of these, at least a quarter are corpses), completely destroying politics and militarily to Hamas and ensure that Gaza “does not again pose a threat.” Netanyahu insists that “total victory” is “within reach”, after dismantling 18 of the 24 Hamas battalions, and inexorably moves to invade Rafah, a precarious refuge for the majority of Gazans and where his own allies have drawn a Red line.
“Today it is clear to everyone—except those who follow him blindly—that the promises of 'total victory' that Netanyahu makes one day, one day too, are totally useless,” Amos Harel, a military affairs commentator, wrote this Friday. from the
Haaretz
newspaper . “The expectation of dismantling the Hamas regime and annihilating all of its military capabilities was too high, certainly within a rigid time frame of a few months. The war was destined to be prolonged and it is hard to believe that it will be possible to completely dismantle the regime even in the future.”
Hundreds of people protest in Tel Aviv to demand the Government reach an agreement to release the Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza six months after the attack on October 7.ABIR SULTAN (EFE)
Israel, furthermore, has never been closer to a war with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah or even with Iran, after assassinating last Monday
one of its main military commanders. Eran Etzion, deputy director general of Israel's National Security Council, defined this decision just now as one of "the most scandalous" in the country's history, since "the probability of a response is quite high." “Israel is at the greatest strategic disadvantage in its history, but the government responsible for it brings us to the brink of a war with an enemy more powerful and sophisticated than any we have ever known,” at a time when its international image “ is at a historic low”, its main ally (the United States) does not trust Netanyahu, the Arab countries are tired of unsuccessfully seeking a ceasefire in Gaza and Europe sees the war as “damaging to its strategic agenda.”
“Six months after embarking on a war supposedly intended to restore security, Israel can be said to be much less secure and faces many more threats, theaters and fronts than at any other time” in its 75-year history, he lamented this Saturday. Mairav Sonszein, senior analyst on Israel at the International Crisis Group
think tank
, on the social network
The debate around Netanyahu
The debate – often more personal than political and more emotional than ideological – revolves around Netanyahu. It is, in a way, as if Israel has returned to October 6. The Government is in danger due to an issue that greatly affects the more secular Israel of European origin that was already protesting against the judicial reform: the exemption from compulsory military service for the ultra-Orthodox.
Last week, those demanding his resignation, an early election and an agreement for the return of the hostages demonstrated together. Struggles sometimes connect. At the end of the protest in Plaza Democracia they called to join the protest of the hostages' families, in the same city. The trust gap between the Government and the latter has been growing due to the conviction that Netanyahu is stopping a second exchange with Hamas out of dark personal convenience. Accused in three cases of corruption, he would easily lose the elections, according to all the polls released since October 7. The Hamas attack left his “Mr. Security” credentials in tatters. The judicial reform, today in a drawer, had already worn down his popularity.
On Wednesday, Parliament experienced an unprecedented image. Relatives of hostages and activists stained the showcase of the guest gallery yellow with their palms (the color that symbolizes their movement). Security intervened. “In no other country in the world would this Government be in power on October 8,” reacted the former prime minister and opposition leader, Yair Lapid.
Netanyahu's words about his constant personal involvement in reaching an agreement no longer hide the dimension of the gap, which came to light this Saturday with particular harshness. The army announced the recovery of the lifeless body of one of the hostages, Elad Katzir, in a night operation in Khan Yunis. Intelligence information, he added, points to him being murdered in January by his Islamic Jihad captors.
His sister, Carmit Palty Katzir, has responded with a painful message on Facebook in which she accuses the Executive of Elad's death. “It could have been saved in time with an agreement […] Look in the mirror and see if your hands have not shed that blood,” she wrote. Palty Katzir echoed the uncertainty that the relatives suffer after half a year of waiting and weekly demonstrations: “What the military spokesperson will not tell you is that the prime minister, the Government and the army have no idea where the most of the hostages, nor do they have a way to protect them, even if they knew where they are.”
Netanyahu insisted last week that “Hamas hardens its position” in the dialogue when “Israel shows flexibility,” so increasing concessions “does not bring an agreement closer, but rather distances it.” Nisim Vaturi, one of the deputies from Netanyahu's party (Likud) who bites the least his tongue, has gone so far as to accuse "a minority of the hostages' families" of preferring to "overthrow the Government" rather than embrace their loved ones again. dear ones. The Minister of Legacy, the ultra Amijai Eliyahu, described a recent protest in Tel Aviv as a “gift to Hamas” that “weakens the soldiers on the front.”
The first ceasefire, in November, was easy and cheap: three prisoners for one hostage. A decade earlier, Netanyahu himself had released a thousand for a single soldier, among them Yahia Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza whom political and military leaders have not called a “dead man” for weeks because he is expected to continue hidden in some tunnel in the Strip, despite surveillance drones, thousands of interrogations and troops in every corner, except Rafah, whose invasion Netanyahu has turned into a mixture of a catchphrase for the electorate and a distraction maneuver.
Several Palestinian men walk past kiosks installed next to buildings destroyed on the last Friday of Ramadan on a street in the Al Nusairat refugee camp, in the Gaza Strip, last Friday.MOHAMMED SABER (EFE)
One of the reasons that leads more Israelis to assume that Netanyahu is buying time is the proximity of the elections in the United States. It's November and Donald Trump is the favorite. It is a risky bet, because they had a bad relationship when they coincided in power. In fact, with the blood of the corpses of October 7 still hot, he came out to say that he "will never forget" that Netanyahu "left him in the lurch" by annulling the night before "without explaining why" his participation in the assassination of a powerful Iranian general. Qasem Soleimani, in 2020 in Baghdad. Also because it is difficult for him to understand what he wants. He advocates for a ceasefire, because he is not “sure” that he likes how Israel is conducting the war and because “it is losing the public relations battle”, but encourages him to “quickly finish what he has started” to return “to normality and peace.” And he has reached the absurd point of blaming the president, Joe Biden, directly for the attack on October 7: “They don't respect him, he can't put two words together, he's stupid […] They would never have done it, if I were there [in the House White]".
Israel is not isolated. Not even the Arab countries have cut off relations and the United States has not stopped sending weapons and has vetoed three ceasefire resolutions. But more and more Democratic voices are calling for turning off the tap. His recent abstention from the UN Security Council marked the first wake-up call and the killing this week of the seven aid workers cemented the change in tone and pressure. This Thursday, Biden extracted from Netanyahu his first major concession in half a year: the opening of a crossing (Erez) and the use of a port (Ashdod) for humanitarian aid to enter.
Trump is unpredictable, but during his term he recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel - shattering decades of American foreign policy and international consensus - and entrusted his son-in-law Jared Kushner with a "deal of the century" that sleeps the sleep of the righteous due to his partiality towards the Jewish State. Kushner, by the way, said last February in an interview that properties on Gaza's shattered coast "may have a lot of value" and suggested that the army take civilians in Rafah to the Israeli Negev desert "until the job is done." .
Last Sunday the media mistakenly received images of Netanyahu minutes before the press conference. Perhaps because of the hernia operation he had just after, from which he has already been discharged, one sees a despotic leader ("Are you crazy?" he threw at the team), irritable and unsure of how to start the speech ("Citizens from Israel, good afternoon... Why 'good afternoon'? Well, it doesn't matter). Three days later, the key to the stability of the war government, Benny Gantz, called for early elections in September. He has not appeared before the press with Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for weeks. With the first, his body language denotes distrust. With the second, respect between two former high military commanders, despite their ideological differences.
Gantz justified it by “preventing cracks in the nation.” In reality, it has more to do with the fact that the polls show him as the eventual winner and with the pressure he receives within his party (National Unity) and from the part of the opposition that did not want to join the Executive. His departure would not leave Netanyahu in a minority (he would maintain with ultranationalists and ultra-Orthodox, his partners since the 2022 elections, the most right-wing coalition in the history of the country), but he would activate the timer towards the polls.
Gantz set the date for the elections “at the lowest point in the short life of the Government of which he is a part,” one of the most influential political commentators, Nahum Barnea, recalled in the newspaper
Yediot Aharonot
, summing up the moment: “The army hesitates. In Gaza, the mistaken attack on seven human rights activists has caused possibly irreversible damage to the expansion of fighting to Rafah, the assassination of the Iranian general may lead Israel into a regional war, and relations with the Biden Administration and the Israel's position in American public opinion is collapsing.
Six months of war in Gaza
October 7, 2023.
Hamas launches a massive surprise attack, killing about 1,200 people and taking more than 240 hostages. It is the deadliest day in the history of Israel. Netanyahu announces a "long and difficult" war.
October 8, 2023.
The Hezbollah militia begins launching projectiles against Israel, which is bombing Lebanon. The clashes continue daily and have increased in intensity.
October 9, 2023.
The Israeli Minister of Defense announces the "total blockade" of Gaza: "No water, no food, no electricity."
October 13, 2023.
Israel orders more than a million Gazans to move to southern Gaza.
October 19, 2023.
Yemen's Houthis launch missiles and drones at a US warship.
October 21, 2023.
An agreement forged by the United States allows the entry (very limited) of humanitarian aid from Egypt.
October 28, 2023.
Israel begins the ground invasion.
November 15, 2023.
Troops enter Al Shifa, Gaza's main hospital, for the first time.
From November 21 to December 1, 2023.
Ceasefire in which Israel and Hamas exchange hostages for Palestinian prisoners.
February 29, 2024.
More than 100 Gazan civilians die while pursuing a convoy with humanitarian aid. One part, due to army shots.
March 18, 2024.
The main food security analysis network warns that famine in northern Gaza is “imminent.”
April 1, 2024.
Israel ends its second invasion of Al Shifa hospital, which is left seriously damaged and with bodies on the ground. He claims to have killed about "200 terrorists" in two weeks and arrested another 500.
April 1, 2024.
Israel raises the risk of regional war by assassinating a senior Iranian military commander at the ambassador's residence in Damascus.
April 2, 2024.
Unanimous condemnation of the Israeli army for killing seven collaborators of chef José Andrés' NGO in a triple aerial bombardment. In the investigation, he admits "serious errors" and suspends two managers.
April 5, 2024.
Under pressure from the White House, Netanyahu opens an entry route for aid to Gaza and allows the use of a port.
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