The protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are hurting him, weakening his position with his partners/rivals in the government and his opponents in the opposition. But do they herald a Leftist Spring? Almost certainly not. People are demonstrating out of collective fear, a feeling that politics has lost its way, and hatred of the Right and the religious. But the protests do not offer any new direction. There is no news from the Left, on either social or political issues, and no new political force has arisen.
The groups that are protesting started to work even before the coronavirus epidemic began in Israel. They entered the enormous vacuum of the Left and the center-Left that was personified by hollow parties that ran in repeated elections in 2019 and 2020, and mostly, by the absence of any significant diplomatic or socioeconomic plan. A tyrannical, nothing party like Yesh Atid was replaced by the bunch of directionless generals in Blue and White, not to mention the old-guard parties Labor and Meretz, whose diplomatic worldviews crashed and burned, and who sold off their social vision ages ago. It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no alternative to the Right and that the center-Left parties are so weak that they can't win an election, even against a leader indicted for bribery. That is the sociological and emotional background to the protests. Fear, fury, but mostly, helplessness and a loss of sanity.
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The protests have grown after the election loss and after some of Netanyahu's opponents joined the bizarre two-headed coalition he formed because of the failure to "defeat" coronavirus and successfully deal with the second wave. But their hollow character has not changed, or their political pointlessness.
When we compare the current protests to the protests that swept over the country after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and even to what we call the "social justice protests" of 2011, we see a clear process of political protest in Israel being turned into a children's game. The Yom Kippur War brutally exposed the rigidity of thought that had seized the socialist government since the 1967 Six-Day War. The protests that came after the war led to two groups that offered Israel two contradictory paths: Gush Emunim and Peace Now – settlement throughout the Land of Israel to expand the nation's borders, vs. the aspiration of founding another country, Palestine, between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan. For decades, these two approaches shaped politics (but not necessarily society or the economy). Can we see the start of something similar in the pathetic bunch of protests today?
The next generation of protests, in 2011, were less politically productive, but were still about real-life issues in Israel. The 2011 protests erupted because of the high cost of living, especially housing costs. It was a pretty bourgeois uprising, but apart from that, like its counterparts throughout the democratic world, it pointed out the social inequality that existed after decades of dominance by the neoliberal Right. However, unlike the protests of the 1970s, the 2011 movement produced nothing in Israeli politics, despite the issues it raised, and we saw no socioeconomic plan result from it. It ended with two new Labor MKs, nothing more.
Now that lack of productiveness has worsened, and we are watching a show of protest, sometimes bizarre or hate-filled, nothing more. Israel is dealing with at least two crises now. The one that everyone can see is the economic fallout from the coronavirus epidemic. The less-obvious one is the ongoing strategic challenge of dealing with the collapse of the Arab world around us and the danger that it will spill over into Israel in various ways (such as refugees, immigration, or terrorism), and the increasing threat posed by regional powers Turkey and Iran growing stronger, not to mention players like Russia and China. Israel's diplomatic environs are getting more dangerous all the time, and now we have the economic distress, which has cut off a long period of growth.
What do the protesters have to say about any of this? Nothing. They are more interested in the cases against Netanyahu. It's more important to them to get back at him after many years of humiliation. The infantile nature of these protests is clear to anyone who wants to see it.
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