LONDON: At precisely 6:29 a.m. on Tuesday, Israel’s Hostages and Missing Families Forum launched a “day of struggle” in towns and cities across the country.
It was the biggest mass protest to date against what many in Israel now see as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s willful determination to escalate the war in Gaza at all costs — including the potential sacrifice of the remaining hostages who have been held by Hamas since the attack on Israel, which began at 6:29 a.m. on Oct. 7, 2023.
It was also the most dramatic demonstration yet of an increasingly obvious reality: that the war in Gaza is exposing deep fractures within Israeli society.
Global outrage over the war in Gaza reached new heights on Monday following an Israeli strike on a hospital that killed 20 people, including five journalists working for international news outlets.
But opposition to the war is also rising inexorably within Israel itself, even as the Israel Defense Forces press ahead with Netanyahu’s plan to broaden the war and attack Gaza City in the face of international condemnation.
“Almost every day and every night there are massive protests that block roads,” Rabbi Noa Sattath, head of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, told Arab News.
“The protestors include hostage families, people demanding an end to the war and atrocities in Gaza, ultra-Orthodox men who have staged huge protests against plans to draft them into the army, and other people who feel it’s unfair that the ultra-Orthodox are not serving yet. It is all pretty chaotic for everyday life.”
Sattath is speaking from her car, and her conversation with Arab News is briefly interrupted. “I was just stopped by a nice woman who gave me an anti-war sticker,” she said.
Last week, the Israeli Cabinet approved plans for an assault on Gaza City despite Hamas agreeing to mediators’ proposals for a 60-day ceasefire, which would have seen half of the surviving hostages released.
Israeli peace campaigners say this broadening of the war, in tandem with increasing attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank by radical Israeli settlers, benefits only Netanyahu and the far-right members of his coalition government.
In May, thousands gathered in Jerusalem for a two-day People’s Peace Summit, organized by It’s Time, a coalition of more than 60 Jewish and Arab peacebuilding and shared-society organizations founded last year “to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a political agreement that will ensure both peoples’ right to self-determination and secure lives.”
The coalition accuses Netanyahu’s government of conducting “a criminal war for political reasons that are certainly not in the interest of the Israeli people.”
Leading establishment figures, from high-ranking former members of the military to politicians, have expressed concern about the direction in which Netanyahu and his Cabinet are taking Israel.
On Tuesday, in an interview with public radio, Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief of staff, whose soldier son Gal was killed in Gaza, said Netanyahu’s government “is not worthy of Gal (and) many combat soldiers and, unfortunately, also the hostages, who lost their lives because of cowardice and … political and ideological considerations of those who want to return to the settlement of the Gaza Strip.”
Appearing on the Arab News current affairs program “Frankly Speaking” on Sunday, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert spoke of the “deep division between a major part of public opinion which is in favor of changing course, and a part which is now governed by the Netanyahus and the group of thugs which are known to be the Cabinet ministers.”
Netanyahu’s war, he added, “is an unneeded and unnecessary war … There is not any national interest of Israel which can be served by continuing the war. And therefore, the inevitable conclusion is that it serves the personal interests of the prime minister.”
Civil groups in Israel are not shying away from using the word “genocide” to describe what is happening.
On July 28, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published a powerful report, titled “Our Genocide,” condemning the “genocidal regime in Israel.”
The report concluded that “an examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads us to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.”
The report came with a stark statement from B’Tselem Executive Director Yuli Novak. “Nothing prepares you for the realization that you are part of a society committing genocide. This is a deeply painful moment for us,” she said.
The genocide, she added, is rooted in part in the existential fear among Israelis created by the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023 — a fear now being exploited by “the extremist, far-right messianic government … to promote an agenda of destruction and expulsion.”
“Messianic” is a word that has increasing resonance in, and consequences for, Israeli society.
Messianism, said Sattath, “is really dangerous. What they are trying constantly to achieve is to ignite another front in the war, either in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem or inside Israel.”
For the messianic element in Israeli society, major disasters in Jewish history — from the Holocaust to the Oct. 7 attack and the subsequent war — are interpreted as painful but divinely guided stages on the path toward ultimate redemption.
In this view, such events are part of a larger historical process leading to the full resettling of what they believe to be the biblical Land of Israel, extending beyond today’s borders to include all of Palestine and parts of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.
Many in Israel, said Sattath, are looking toward the country’s next election, half in hope, half in fear. “We don’t know when the elections will be,” she said. “The full term for the government would be November 2026, but we have not had a government that completed a full term since 1981.”
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel and other organizations, she said, have multiple concerns about the upcoming election.
“One is changes to election laws in order to disqualify Arab candidates and parties from running. There’s legislation that hasn’t been advanced yet, but it could get advanced very quickly, and that would have dramatic effects on the elections.
“We are also worried about police harassment of voters, because the police have been so taken over by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, or voter harassment by thugs in which the police would not intervene.
“Everybody’s looking towards the next elections. But we are very worried about whether free and fair elections are even possible under the current system.”
Another issue fragmenting Israeli society is whether or not ultra-Orthodox Jews should be drafted into the military. This is something they bitterly oppose, while other Israelis resent having to send their sons and daughters to die while the ultra-Orthodox are exempt.
A recent survey found “a sharp drop in support for the current situation of exempting ultra-Orthodox” — only 9 percent compared with 22 percent 10 months earlier. Meanwhile, support for conscripting the ultra-Orthodox rose from 67 percent last year to more than 84.5 percent, with a third of respondents backing economic penalties for those who refuse to serve.
In a special research paper for Arab News, Yossi Mekelberg, a professor of international relations and a senior consulting fellow of the MENA Program at the UK-based Chatham House think-tank, highlighted the “mutual opportunism” that had seen Netanyahu join forces with two ultra-Orthodox parties in order to maintain his grip on power.
It was, wrote Mekelberg, “a measure of how far to the right the political discourse in Israel has shifted” that in 2022 the parties Religious Zionism and Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) had gained nearly 11 percent of the vote and 14 seats in the Knesset.
The parties are led by settlers, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose rewards for supporting Netanyahu were jobs in his Cabinet, as finance minister and national security minister, respectively.
The ultra-Orthodox, once a small, isolated element in society, now pose a long-term demographic threat to the very future of Israel.
With a fertility rate among the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredim, of 6.1 children per woman, compared with 2.3 among non-Haredi Jews, the growth rate of Haredi society is about 4 percent a year — double the rest of Israel’s population.
In 2024, the 1.26 million Haredi Jews accounted for 16 percent of the total Jewish population of Israel. At the current rate of growth, a quarter of Israel’s population will be Haredim by 2065.
According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, one-third of the 480,000 Jews living in West Bank settlements or outposts are Haredim.
As Israel’s war in Gaza drags on, there is increasing pressure on the government to call up Haredim youth to serve in the military — a red line for a religious group that until now has been exempt from military service on the historical basis that they can best protect Israel by studying the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew bible.
The exemption was granted in 1948 by Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. Since then, however, the number of ultra-Orthodox Jews has grown dramatically and in June last year, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the IDF should begin drafting Haredim.
Israel needs more troops for its latest Gaza campaign. As part of its controversial plan, the IDF is currently calling up 60,000 reservists, but very few Haredim are answering the call — each year, fewer than 10 percent of the 13,000 eligible ultra-Orthodox youths enlist.
Protests against conscription have seen thousands of Haredim take to the streets, driving a wedge between mainstream Israeli society and a once small and marginal faction that has now become disproportionately influential.
“What we are seeing now is the Israeli tribes fighting each other,” Dr. Ahron Bregman, a senior teaching fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and a former officer in the IDF, told Arab News.
The Israeli “tribes,” he said, “are pulling in different directions, and it is hard for me to see how they could come together again.
“The small but influential settler tribe wants to expand into the West Bank and expel the West Bankers. The Tel Aviv liberal camp is wary of the consequences of the occupation.
“The Haredi tribe doesn’t really care much about what Israel does or doesn’t do as long as they don’t have to serve in the military and as they keep getting their money from the state.”
Israelis should, he added, be careful what they wish for.
“There is a growing effort to put pressure on the Haredim to join the military. I believe that they will be enlisted in the end, because there is a real need for more manpower as the IDF is too small and the missions too big.
“But personally, I would not like them to be enlisted, as they will make the military even more religious than it already is.”
Bregman believes Israeli society has become so fractured — by the war, the ideological settlement of Palestinian lands, and demographic changes under way — that he fears the worst.
“Tensions within Israeli society are so high that the situation could easily deteriorate into an open civil war,” he said.
“What could spark such a war? For example, the refusal of Netanyahu to accept the results of the forthcoming general elections. Or maybe even a political assassination.”
