Palestinian Hunger Must Have a Place in Israeli Protest
In the center of the front line of the marchers who filled the width of King George Street in downtown Jerusalem, two young men stretched a banner between them that read, “Starvation is a war crime.” Behind them, in the stifling night heat, came the drummers and the megaphone-bearers who provided lyrics for the drums’ thundering:
Security is not achieved
On the corpses of children!
The crowd chanted responsively. Another call followed: No more abandonment!
This referred to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu government’s abandoning of Israeli hostages in Hamas tunnels. The marchers, carrying pictures of hostages and of Gazan children, and Israeli flags and yellow flags that stand for bringing hostages home, poured into Paris Square, near Netanyahu’s house, on a recent Saturday night.
Then speeches began. They focused on the hostages and the need for a ceasefire deal with Hamas that would free all of them immediately. One speaker did include “hunger” in her words, and said, “Let us end this evil war. Let us feed the children.” Otherwise, I did not hear starvation of Palestinian civilians mentioned from the stage. The absence was stark, at a time when reports of escalating malnutrition in Gaza have filled media outside Israel and those parts of the Israeli media willing to report on it.
Standing on the square, I agreed with all that was said about the hostages, the anguish of their families, and the government that seems more interested in endless war than in its duty to free them. But I was also dismayed. The war that began with Hamas’s unthinkably cruel attack on Israel has morphed into inconceivable brutality ordered by our government. And I was struck by the dissonance between the march and the rally that followed, between the voices from the crowd demanding to stop that horror and the speeches that largely avoided talking about it.
Jerusalem is a right-leaning city, and rallying for the hostages is a weekly ritual. This time, I’d estimate, perhaps 2,000 people came out.
Two nights earlier, I’d headed to Tel Aviv for a one-off demonstration, headlined explicitly as “End the War, Bring Everyone Home.” The stress on stopping the war, and the advertised participation of soldiers’ parents, marked a shift in mainstream protests from the hostages alone. Implicitly, “everyone” included Israeli troops. The price of the war in the deaths of Israeli soldiers, in long and traumatic reserve duty for many Israeli citizens, and in the strain on the families of those in combat is growing as a political issue.
Near sunset, protesters flooded a boulevard and marched past the Defense Ministry to the wide square in front of Habima Theater, a spot synonymous with protest against the Netanyahu government. Inside the square, the crowd was so dense I could barely move. Drone photos show the overflow spilling out into surrounding streets. Organizers estimated the numbers at 50,000 to nearly 100,000—or close to 1 percent of the country’s population. It may have been the largest protest since the outpouring of rage last September after six kidnapped Israelis were murdered in Gaza while Netanyahu evaded a hostage deal.
The dissonance I would see in Jerusalem was here on a larger scale: Protesters held signs calling for a hostage deal and to end starvation, and simply, in English, to “End This F*cking War.” On the big screen set up on the square, we saw the mother of a hostage speak, and the father of soldier who’d been critically wounded three weeks earlier. “We raised a wonderful generation. Why are we killing them, wounding them, traumatizing them for years, and pushing them to suicide? For what? For what?” he asked.
“The state has lost the trust of the mothers,” said the mother of an officer serving in Gaza. “We have no more children to sacrifice.”
All their reasons for ending the war were true. But I waited for outrage about Palestinian hunger, and did not hear it.
The Tel Aviv rally was organized by retired General Noam Tibon, working with parents of fallen soldiers. He was responding, he told me, to “soldiers dying in Gaza for political reasons,” to the danger to the remaining hostages, and to “Israel’s international isolation.” Tibon weighed each word; he stopped short rather than describe the reason for that isolation.
I asked why famine had not been mentioned in the speeches. “Look, many people come to the demonstration,” he said. “The goal is to end the war, for Israel’s own good. I try to be practical. Ending the war will also help people in Gaza.” The voices of the bereaved parents “changed the whole Israeli discourse,” he said.
In Jerusalem, the weekly rallies are put together by Sharing Our Preserved Home, a group born before the war in the protests against the Netanyahu government’s autocratic constitutional coup. Eyal Gur, a leading activist, told me that the march reflects the political diversity in the city. At the rally, “the stage is given to the hostage issue—the families and the whole system of support around them. And their choice is to be more moderate.”
In other words, they appeared to imply, the most public part of the protest—the announced messages, the speeches likely to be quoted in the media—must seek the widest consensus, and that requires focusing on the suffering and death of Israelis.
In a country at war, this is disturbing—but not surprising. Look back to America in the Vietnam era: Opposition to the draft was the engine of protest. Pete Seeger sang “Bring Them Home” about U.S. soldiers. Walter Cronkite’s famous 1968 broadcast, often credited with shifting the public consensus, focused on the war being unwinnable, not on Vietnamese civilians killed by American bombs.
This is a classic activists’ dilemma. Politics, I believe, is most of all about getting things done. What needs to be accomplished is ending the war, which will indeed benefit Gazans. I cannot ignore the tactical claim that focusing on what the war is doing to Israel is the best way to mobilize enough Israelis to force the government’s hand. Addressing Gaza’s starvation might turn off people who would otherwise come out to protest. Speaking of Israeli war crimes certainly could do that.
Yet muteness in the face of what is happening in Gaza is unbearable. Another price of war is the moral callousness it produces. To accept silence about the dehumanization of Palestinians adds to that price.
There have been smaller protests directly addressing the famine in Gaza, organized by Standing Together, a movement of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis. Alon-Lee Green, the group’s co-director, told me that the problem with the mainstream demonstrations is that they’ve stuck with the same messages as at the start of the war.
“The most basic question in politics is whether you assimilate into the consensus” or lead it, Green said. For that reason, Standing Together also took part in the major Tel Aviv demonstration and handed out pictures of Gazan children and signs against starvation.
The mainstream demonstrations are necessary; I can only hope that they escalate. Yet the protest within the protest is essential.
At the end of the rally in Jerusalem, an older man at the back of the crowd shouted: “The hostages are not the whole story! They are part of the story, not all of it!” He spoke for me as well, and for many of us.