“We hope the world hears us and knows that the people of Israel are not the government of Israel,” said one protester.
Israelis protested on Saturday night, calling for a ceasefire and the resignation of hardline Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Tens of thousands took to the streets in Tel Aviv to demand that the government reach a deal with Hamas to secure the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza.
They also called for new elections, accusing Netanyahu of prolonging the conflict to keep himself in power.
The problem is that there is a lot of Israelis who are now against Netanyahu, but who are still in support of the genocide in Gaza, or who are always in support of the Settler terrorism and slow genocide in the Westbank.
No Israeli government has reduced or at least stopped settlements since Rabin was murdered. The Center and Center Left of Israeli politics are equally in favor of an Apartheid occupation and running Israel as a supremacist ethnostate.
There is some people that genuinely reject all of this fascist nonsense and demand actual peace and actual justice in Israel. But unfortunately they are very much a minority. And when they speak up they often get threatened, harassed and attacked.
Quoth the Haaretz: “Jigal Amir won”.
The possible silver lining is that Netanyahu also demonstrated that the right-wing’s idea of how to ensure security – namely, by antagonising Palestinians into submission – doesn’t work. But that kind of insight will take a while to actually sink in.
And another thing that needs to happen is Israelis not shying away from looking at what’s being done to Palestinians. The Israeli press is self-censoring, knowing that noone wants to watch or read about the crimes the IDF is committing. It’s wilful ignorance: People want to support the IDF because they at least at some level still believe in the antagonising Palestinians into submission approach, yet they can’t bear to acknowledge what that entails. Which is kinda actually a real silver lining: Imagine if the Israeli press glorified, instead of ignored, all those mass graves and whatnot, what that would say about their audience. In the end it’s still only the Kahanites who actually get a hard-on when seeing Arab corpses.
…the same, side note, btw also happened in the Third Reich: First Nazis were very overt, the pogroms were open, public, they were dragging people through streets and whatnot. They very quickly changed approach, made sure that people were able to ignore what was being done, were able to come up with lies such as “they’re only expelling the Jews” and actually believe in them. Precisely because not every German back then got a hard-on when seeing a Jewish corpse either.
So, please, Israeli people, get rid of those chucklefucks in government before they put you in camps for protesting.