Moments after Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on Sunday night, a message circulated on Israeli WhatsApp. “The dictatorship is here. We must not remain apathetic.” Each week for the past twelve weeks, Israelis of different backgrounds and persuasions had taken to the streets to protest against the government’s plan to overhaul the country’s judiciary. To protesters, Gallant’s dismissal marked the culmination of everything they had been fearing: executive overreach, arbitrary rule, political silencing. The dismissal came a day after Gallant warned that the overhaul plan had compromised Israel’s security. Many reservists have refused to show up for volunteer service. Within minutes of the firing, the streets of Tel Aviv erupted. Protesters thronged the Ayalon expressway. Well after midnight, thousands of demonstrators were still stopping traffic, torching wooden planks, and waving the Israeli flag, which has become a surprising symbol of the resistance movement after years of being associated with the Israeli right. In Jerusalem, people camped overnight outside the Knesset. The next forty-eight hours would prove decisive for the country’s trajectory.
On Monday morning, despite the magnitude of the spontaneous nighttime protests, it became clear that Netanyahu was not backing down. The legislative committee tasked with approving the proposed legislation before it reaches a parliamentary vote was scheduled to convene, although the country’s chief justice, along with leading economists, heads of universities, Nobel laureates, and current and former military heads, had spoken out against the plan for weeks. The package, opponents say, will spur democratic backsliding and political corruption. Perhaps the most controversial law grants the government an effective majority in the selection of judges, which would severely undermine the separation of powers in Israel. But other, seemingly minor laws also stand out, such as one that would allow politicians to receive outside money to cover their private legal expenses. Netanyahu, who is currently on trial on corruption charges, has been ordered by the Supreme Court to return two hundred and seventy thousand dollars that he and his wife accepted from a relative for legal expenses.
With the legislative committee pushing ahead, another call went through the messaging services: shuttle buses were leaving that morning from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem for a demonstration in front of the Knesset. The ride—free of charge—was sponsored by Israel’s high-tech sector, which has issued some of the direst warnings against the proposed legislation and its projected damage to the economy. (That damage is palpable: Israeli investors have lost twenty-six billion dollars since the overhaul was announced, in January, according to the financial newspaper The Marker. The sum is greater than Israel’s annual defense budget.) Among those waiting to board a bus was Asaf Sasson, a twenty-six-year-old former military officer in a special-operations unit. “When we were in the army we fought for the state. Now, we’re fighting over the state,” Sasson told me. Asked what he hoped to achieve, Sasson said, “We’re past the point of freezing the legislation. There’s an alleged criminal in charge of running the country. The only solution is to get rid of him.” A female friend of his piped in: “I think the only solution is a constitution.”
Their answers reflect the changing—and increasingly ambitious—nature of the protest movement, which appears to have stunned Netanyahu’s cabinet. In announcing the sweeping package within a week of its swearing-in, the government unwittingly managed to unify a fragmented and battered opposition. The protesters’ most pressing goal is, of course, the abandonment of the judicial overhaul. But, increasingly, there have been other calls: to unseat Netanyahu, draft a constitution (which Israel lacks), and respect nonreligious Israelis by, among other things, legalizing civic marriages and permitting public transportation on the Sabbath. Protesters also demand what the head of the opposition, Yair Lapid, frequently calls a more “equal burden.” Broadly put, the secular population has served in the military and pays much of Israel’s taxes. By contrast, the ultra-Orthodox, whose representatives form a key part of Netanyahu’s coalition, are overwhelmingly exempt from military service, and about half of ultra-Orthodox men don’t work, lowering their income and their tax burden. Last year, secular Israeli households paid six times more in taxes than ultra-Orthodox households. “The messiah’s donkey has had it,” as one protester put it.
Yet to speak of the protesters as a monolith is misleading, as anyone who has attended one of the demonstrations can attest. There is no single leader to the protest movement, which is its greatest strength and also a potential weakness. When Isaac Herzog, the Israeli President, presented his version of a judicial-reform compromise earlier this month, it was unclear who in the opposition had the mandate to accept it. There are the reservists, with their “Brothers in Arms” T-shirts and stealth operations. (Recently, some of them used barbed wire and sandbags to block the entrance to the offices of the Kohelet Forum, the think tank that championed much of the overhaul.) There are the anti-occupation activists, though waving the Palestinian flag has been discouraged, reportedly so as not to alienate centrist Israelis. “They refused to accept our symbols,” Rim Hazan, an activist from Haifa told reporters in declining to give a speech at a recent demonstration. There are pockets of professionals: doctors, mental-health workers, artists, and civil servants. Academics have lately offered online lectures on such topics as “Democracy on the Brink,” with insights from countries that have undergone similar transitions, such as Hungary, Poland, and Turkey.
And then, in almost every demonstration, comes the moment when the wave of protesters parts, and a collective breath is drawn: the handmaids appear, marching in pairs, heads lowered. Inspired by Margaret Atwood’s depiction of a dystopian future of female subjugation and enslavement, the handmaids, in their red capes and wide-brimmed bonnets, offer a visceral reminder of what protesters say is at stake for women if the legislation is approved. Agreements between Netanyahu and his coalition partners include clauses that could pave the way for separation between men and women in public spaces, such as banks and clinics. Already, women are grossly underrepresented in the current parliament, making up roughly a quarter of lawmakers.
“When ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ came out, it seemed totally fictional and detached from reality, but now I look at these things like a manual on what’s to come here,” Merav Cohen Mor, an organizer of the handmaid protest, told me. If the standing of the Supreme Court is compromised, she asked, who will guarantee the protection of women? “People talk about minority protections, and of course that’s important. But we’re not even a minority!” she said. The handmaids began as a protest of twenty women in Jerusalem. Recently, they formed a human chain of twenty thousand. A video appeared this week of women in full handmaid costume on the rock salts of the Dead Sea, the lowest land-based place on Earth. The caption read “It doesn’t get any lower than this.”
Back on the bus to Jerusalem, two young men huddled over a video titled “2043,” a faux-documentary in which senior members of Netanyahu’s party express their excuses and regrets as it becomes clear that the country, post-judicial overhaul, had become a failing state, replete with riots and empty supermarket shelves. “Amazing,” one of the men let out. Two rows ahead of them sat Ahuva Leef, a seventy-year-old media consultant from a suburb of Tel Aviv. “As grandparents and as parents, we can’t simply stand by,” Leef said, her voice rising. “This is our independence war.”
The bus reached the entrance to Jerusalem and let its passengers out; they were soon swallowed up amid a hundred thousand protesters from all over the country. The demographics became more diverse. Among the protesters was eighty-eight-year-old Gidon Lev, who held up a sign addressing Netanyahu: “You are giving me, a Holocaust survivor, terrible memories.” Oria Feuerstein-Rozen, an elementary-school teacher who wore a purple head covering, said that she was part of a group calling itself “religious, Zionists, democratic.” The protests were long past questions of right versus left, Feuerstein-Rozen said, adding that she feared for the “delicate mosaic that is the Israeli people.”
Though they stood mere metres from the Knesset, protesters had no inkling of what was taking place inside. Cell reception was out. Had lawmakers voted? Was it too late? It’s a peculiarity of modern demonstrating that participants are often the last to know about the latest developments. In fact, the legislative committee had voted; the proposed bill passed and was now ready to be taken up by the broader parliament. Then word came that the state’s largest workers’ union, the Histadrut, had declared a general strike. Shopping malls closed. Schools let out. Hospitals curtailed medical services. Many flights were grounded at Ben Gurion Airport. Some protesters cheered. Here, at last, was an indication that they were breaking through. But any sense of euphoria was fleeting. As protesters dispersed that evening, drivers snarled in traffic called out: “Anarchists!” “Law breakers!” Soon, a counter-protest formed, as supporters of the overhaul—among them members of the far-right groups La Familia and Lehava—flooded a park near the Supreme Court.
That night, Netanyahu spoke for the first time since the dismissal. He was suspending the legislation—for now. In order to do so, he had to get his hard-line ministers on board. Chief among the resisters had been Itamar Ben-Gvir, his extremist national-security minister. In exchange for Ben-Gvir’s acquiescence, Netanyahu had agreed to form a new national guard that would serve under Ben-Gvir’s command: a political militia, as commentators were quick to note. In his speech, Netanyahu likened Israel to the baby in the Biblical story of Solomon’s judgment. In the story, Solomon has to rule on a case involving two women who both claim to be a baby’s mother. Solomon suggests cutting the baby in half, causing the true mother to reveal herself: she cries out that the other woman can have the baby so long as it is not harmed. Protesters against the overhaul were the false mother, Netanyahu implied: in their actions, they were cutting Israel in half. It was the kind of toxic call for reconciliation that has become a Netanyahu trademark.
Media outlets, especially overseas, announced the suspension in legislation as a win for the protest movement. Certainly, there was a sense of relief among opponents of the overhaul. As Michael Hauser Tov, a political reporter for Haaretz, and a vocal critic of the legislation, noted, “We were this close to a total transformation in the State of Israel. The victory we have here is huge.” Still, he warned, “It’s not the end of the fight.” The damage to the economy and to Israel’s security capabilities is already felt and appears to be long-lasting. Israel’s diplomatic relations have also taken a beating. On Wednesday, President Biden was asked if he would invite Netanyahu to the White House anytime soon. “No,” he replied instantly. “Not in the near term.” Most crucial, perhaps, a key part of the legislative package still exists—in the form of a bill that can be pushed through at any given moment with a simple parliamentary majority. The threat of a judicial overhaul, its critics say, is still imminent. Protests will resume on Saturday night. ♦
The photograph accompanying an earlier version of this article was changed after publication.
