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Argument: Israel’s Protesters Refuse To Be Donkeys

An entire generation is taking to the streets to resist what they see as the rise of a corrupt theocracy.

— By Gitit Ginat | Foreign Policy | July 24th, 2023

Demonstrators block a highway during a protest against the Israeli government's judicial reform plan in Tel Aviv on July 24. Jack Guez/AFP Via Getty Images

Kaplan Street is one of the main thoroughfares leading into and out of Tel Aviv. It was built along the outline of a German Templar colony, whose pro-Nazi descendants were expelled from British Mandate Palestine during World War II. During the 1960s and 70s, it was filled with Israeli governmental and cultural institutions, such as the Jewish Agency and the Israel Journalists Association. These days, Kaplan is the street where, every Saturday, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protest the attempted judicial coup led by the coalition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Contrary to the common version in the global press, the protesters are not only the scions of the old, privileged establishment. Those gathering on Kaplan are a big tent, including both the financially comfortable and the struggling. While some of the protest movement leaders are military elites or tech moguls, many others are not. The most vulnerable of them are set to become the main casualties of Netanyahu’s judicial coup. That’s because their children, who study in the public school system, may witness its slow collapse due to funds being redirected to the religious and ultra-Orthodox institutions.

Their kids, who—unlike most ultra-Orthodox Jews—serve a full term in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), will sit idle at home because in Israel, there is no public transport on the Sabbath. Single mothers will have their state support reduced in favor of ultra-Orthodox families with multiple children. People who live in peripheral areas will have to struggle against an ultra-Orthodox takeover of their towns. The first step will be a political takeover of the municipalities, followed by massive benefits to the ultra-Orthodox population. According to reports, this process is already happening in cities such as Tiberias, Safed, Arad, and Mitzpe Ramon.

They are Jews, Palestinians, men, women, native Israelis, and immigrants who arrived from developing countries via the Law of Return. The common denominator for all of them is the struggle against turning into a so-called donkey.

In Jewish tradition, the Messiah’s Donkey refers to the donkey upon which the Messiah will arrive at the end of days. In Israel, the phrase refers to the doctrine ascribed to the teachings of Abraham Isaac Kook: The secular Jews, who represent the material world, are an instrument in the hands of God whose purpose was to establish the state of Israel and begin the process of redemption. Upon Israel’s establishment, the secular Jews would be required to step aside and allow the religious to govern the state.

Kook, who immigrated to Ottoman Palestine from what is now Latvia in 1904, is considered one of the spiritual fathers of religious Zionism. According to him, the Zionist enterprise was a new historical development of the era of redemption. Nevertheless, Kook was terrified of secularism. He believed that secular education had “sinned greatly against the spirit of Israel” and represented “the beginning of the decay and the basis of all bad assimilation.” Kook sought to settle the contradiction. The secular Zionists, he wrote, are allowed to be the bricks of the building of redemption, “but when the secret of the righteous is to be revealed,” it would be easy to differentiate “between God’s servants and those who are not.”

“Ben-Gurion’s compromises with ultra-Orthodox parties turned out to be a disaster for secular Israelis.”

Unlike Kook, Israel’s founder David Ben-Gurion was an atheist. He came from a religious background and respected Jewish heritage. At the end of the 1950s, a Bible study group gathered in his house, and the prophets were his favorite biblical characters. Nevertheless, Ben-Gurion did not attend synagogue and used to travel on the Sabbath. He made compromises with ultra-Orthodox parties only because of political constraints. It turned out to be a disaster for secular Israelis.

Kook’s prediction is about to come true, with one difference: Israel will not be a theocracy. It will be a country using religious law to allow profound corruption. In the past six months, there have been many reports on improper political appointments within the Likud party and its religious partners. Some of the coalition members have past criminal convictions, and there are reports of improper past conduct by others. And the country’s transformation into a corrupt religious state won’t only strengthen its ideological rivals—Israel is also a potential international drug trade route; such a shift may boost organized crime.

Over the next decade, the government plans to increase the budget of ultra-Orthodox educational institutions by 40 percent. This will make Israel the first country in the developed world that incentivizes schools that barely teach core subjects such as math, science, and English. The governmental supervision of ultra-Orthodox schools is weak, leaving vague information available about their curriculum. But according to sources in the education ministry, these schools teach primarily religious topics: the Talmud, Mishna and Torah.

English, math, and even Hebrew are studied at an elementary level. In addition, more than $600 million of the coalition budget will be dedicated to empowering Jewish identity among students in the state education system, IDF soldiers, university students, and residents of secular and liberal cities. Aryeh Deri, the head of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, a convicted tax evader and one of the most powerful politicians in the coalition, plans a series of laws that might allow the ultra-Orthodox to take over secular towns politically.

Meanwhile, secular Israelis will pay six times more in taxes than the ultra-Orthodox, who constitute only 8 percent of the Israeli workforce. Their children will be obligated, as they are today, to serve a full term in the army (three years for men and two for women), while so-called national-religious men can serve in the army for a reduced term and most ultra-Orthodox are exempt.

Despite these facts, since the country’s founding, the secular population has been deprived of some basic liberties. This is because Israel has never created a constitution separating church and state. As a result, among other things, the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate holds a monopoly on marriage, which forces many secular Israelis to get married in other countries, or even online. Israel has no formal public transportation on Saturdays, which strands the millions of residents who don’t own a car.

“The liberals are beginning to realize that they will be used as the donkey up to the moment Israel is subjected to religious law,” said Yair Nehorai, a lawyer and the author of The Third Revolution, a book documenting the teachings of the rabbinic mentors of the messianic movement. “But this realization,” he noted, “is too difficult.”

“They will no longer be the majority in the country within a few decades, and they will have to say: This is not my country,” Nehorai said.

Israeli security forces use a water cannon to disperse demonstrators blocking the entrance of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, in Jerusalem on July 24. Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP via Getty Images

The idea of dividing Israel into cantons, which for years has been received with mockery due to the country’s small size and security challenges, has been gaining more and more traction over the past few months, and liberals are angrily calling to separate “Israel” from “Judea.” For some, Judea means the occupied territories. For others, Judea represents all ultra-Orthodox and messianic Jews, whether they live in Bnei Brak (in Israel proper) or Hebron (in the West Bank).

Sagi Elbaz, the author of Emergency Exit: From Tribalism to Federation, the Road to Healing Israeli Society, told me that these cantons will begin with the liberal Israeli cities. “A secular rebellion manifested itself, for example, when the municipalities of Tel Aviv and several other liberal cities launched a network of bus routes that operate on the Sabbath,” he explained.

Until recently, Kaplan Street appeared to welcome protesters of all stripes. Next to No. 8, where the offices of the tech company Fiverr are located, CEO Micha Kaufman hands out free water bottles. Not far from Kaplan 17-19 stand the protesters of the “Anti-Occupation Bloc,” forcing passers-by to acknowledge the elephant in the room with signs such as “No Democracy with Occupation.” Kaplan 22 looks like the mother base of “Women Building an Alternative,” whose photos dressed as handmaids from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel A Handmaid’s Tale have gained worldwide publicity. Next to them are the members of “The Pink Front,” who have ironically swapped the Israeli blue-and-white flag for a pink-and-white one.

At the end of Kaplan and on the adjacent Namir Street, you can find the unironic blue-and-white. And khaki. This is the center of activity for “Brothers in Arms—Warriors Journeying to Save Democracy,” a grassroots umbrella organization that includes several reservist groups.

Israeli researchers have often noted that, compared to developed Western countries, Israel struggles with establishing a free and open civil society, as the Israelis are attached at the hip to their army. Despite this, the veterans demonstrating on Kaplan are not all the same: Some served in the special forces. Others spent three unremarkable years, mostly killing time. Some veterans abused their power over the Palestinians. Others were discharged with physical and mental scars.

Some believe that serving in the occupied territories is a critical security goal. Others feel that they were forced to go there, but never came out in public to say so. Some of them committed acts of heroism. A few others proved their heroism by refusing to commit acts that they have deemed immoral.

“This is the Most Irresponsible Government in the History of Israel.”

Brothers in Arms, the embodiment of the liberal side of the “People’s Army,” has the most leverage of any group in the Israeli protest movement. Now, with the coalition resuming its legislative blitz, special forces veterans have declared that hundreds of them will stop volunteering for reserve duty. The number of objectors is rising. Former directors of special intelligence operations have warned that units across the IDF, the Shin Bet and Mossad are angry and in a state of unrest.

Reserve Col. Ronen Koehler, one of the Brothers in Arms coordinators, told Foreign Policy that until mid-March, “we were just another activist group.” But in the time since, “we received a flood of phone calls from reservists who were expecting us to tell them what to do about their service.” There were questions from high-ranking commanders who have an in-depth understanding of Israel’s strategic infrastructure: What if you are ordered to shoot in a way you were never ordered to before, and you are experienced enough to know that you shouldn’t do it? What happens if a submarine crew is not sure that the person who sent them to sea is trustworthy?

“The flood of phone calls made us realize that something bigger than our protest activities was happening here,” said Koehler, who served as a submarine captain and is a former vice president at Checkpoint, a U.S.-Israeli hardware and software products company.

The government reached the same realization. A secret report that was submitted to Defense Minister Yoav Gallant caused a temporary halt of the judicial coup at the end of February, but it has now resumed with the passage of a law limiting judicial review on Monday—sparking even larger protests.

As successful as the protests have been, liberal civil society and the army veterans struggle to see eye to eye. For various reasons, some practical (to attract right-wing voters) and some ideological, the occupation is barely mentioned in speeches along the Kaplan encampment, and the number of Palestinian-Israelis joining the protests is low.

“The law could grant unlimited power to white-collar criminals, members of organized crime families, cocaine addicts, or messianic fundamentalists.”

Recently, the Anti-Occupation Bloc, which usually demonstrates far from the main stage, decided to pass through the main avenue. The protesters carried a massive sign reading: “We Must Resist Settler Terror.” Some of the Brothers in Arms tried to forcefully remove the sign. After a time, they published a half-hearted apology, and a few days later, they met with Anti-Occupation Bloc representatives to settle matters peacefully.

Some protest participants hate each other, while others love each other. Some are caught in love-hate relationships. “We should be glad about the greatest achievement we got: the creation of a new kind of centrist identity,” Koehler said. “This center includes various shades, from the capitalist, hawkish right that believed in Netanyahu so far but not anymore, through the liberal center and up to the social-democratic left.”

“The protest doesn’t have intrinsic content yet,” Nehorai admitted. “But when a serving coalition is acting in a frenzy, it makes us feel, every minute of every day, that we are connected. The liberal camp is a country that is just being formed.”

All Israelis are facing legislation that will grant unlimited power to anyone the government chooses; they could be white-collar criminals, rehabilitated members of organized crime families, cocaine addicts, or messianic fundamentalists.

A growing number of Israeli liberals, especially younger ones, will soon start negotiating the cargo loaded on their backs, the identity of the hand holding the reins, and the direction of travel. And ultimately, they will refuse to continue being used as donkeys.

— Gitit Ginat is a Freelance Journalist and a former writer for Haaretz.