Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine), 27.04.2024
While the majority of Israelis want to end the war on Gaza, and Hamas offers to release all the Israelis held in Gaza for five years of ceasefire, Netanyahu and his gang want to continue the war and will kill more Palestinians and captive Israelis. Most Israelis know by now that Israel has killed 41 Israelis who were held in Gaza. They want an end to the war in the name of saving the remaining Israeli hostages left in Gaza, 24 who are still believed to be alive, and to bring back the bodies of the 35 dead. Yet starkly absent has been mention of the suffering and devastation being brought upon the civilians of Gaza by Israel’s relentless onslaught.
Meanwhile, different demonstrations against Netanyahu and for the end of the Gazan war and for a deal that will release all the captive Israelis are taking place in Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa.
The mainstream demonstrations want to return Israel to the ethnocratic regime that Netanyahu is changing to extreme right -wing Bonapartism. They call it democracy but in the real world it was an apartheid form by settler colonialists.
According to Time of Israel:
“The main rally against the government took place at Tel Aviv’s Habima Square, where demonstrators gathered to hear from a number of senior officials including the former heads of the Shin Bet and Israel Defense Forces, while protesters demanding a hostage deal gathered at the nearby Hostages Square. The rallies then merged on Begin Road, as they do each week.
Speaking at a press conference ahead of the evening’s events, Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan is held hostage in Gaza. “It is possible to sign a deal tomorrow morning. An entire nation is being deceived. We are told that military pressure will return the kidnapped — it only kills them. The “entire nation” wants an end to the war and the return of all the hostages, Zangauker asserted, accusing Netanyahu of “doing himself a favor, by agreeing, perhaps, to another ‘selection’ deal” — comparing the phased hostage release deals favored by Netanyahu to the Nazi practice of sending sickly Jews to their deaths and healthy Jews to slave labor.”
“At the parallel protest in Habima Square, protesters struck a distinctly more Zionist political tone, the crowd awash in Israeli flags as they demonstrated against Netanyahu and his government.
Ahead of the speeches, a large screen played a brief history of Ben Gvir, who began his political life as a disciple of extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, and an avowed fan of Kahane’s disciple Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Muslim worshipers at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994.The short film accused Netanyahu of normalizing the Kahanist movement four decades after the High Court blocked it from running for parliament.Afterward, thousands gathered to listen as former Shin Bet chief Ami Ayalon called the affidavit submitted by incumbent head Ronen Bar to the High Court against Netanyahu this past week a “pivotal event in our fight for the Jewish-democratic identity of Israe. If the premier uses the domestic security agency to “carry out surveillance of citizens who wish to protest — the black flag is flown before our eyes,” said Ayalon, referring to one of Bar’s accusations against the premier in the document.” [i]
This demonstration does not deserve any form of political support. However, there was another and somewhat better demonstration that it is principally to give it a lower form of political support.
“Thousands of Israeli citizens have marched together in the “biggest mobilization of Jews and Palestinians” since the war in Gaza began, calling for a ceasefire and a solution for both groups to live peacefully side by side.Alon-Lee Green, co-director of the Jewish-Arab peace coalition Standing Together, said more than 2,000 people took to the streets in Tel Aviv on Thursday night to protest against the war in Gaza and demand a ceasefire to bring hostages home. Over 51,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the ground and air assault began on 8 October 2023 after Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel the day before. Almost 2,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war resumed in March. The Gaza health ministry, which counts the dead, does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but more than half of those killed have been women and children.”
“A small but growing number of voices within Israel have begun to push back, calling for an end to the war both to save the hostages and stop the massacre of human life in Gaza. A growing number of letters written by army and air force reservists, retired and even serving officers, have demanded the government end the war, not only in the name of Israeli lives but also innocent civilians in Gaza. Yet after applying for permission, police told the group they were banned from holding up posters of children killed in Gaza and certain phrases such as “ethnic cleansing” were also forbidden. It was not the first time activists had faced such pushback; at other protests, police have regularly confiscated any posters bearing the faces of Gaza’s killed women and children or used force to break them up. Protesters moved through the city holding signs reading “Only peace will bring security” and chanting “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies”. They expressed fury at Israeli politicians.including far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has advocated for the reoccupation of Gaza. Thousands of Palestinians.”
“Yet the most important voice was of Veronika Cohen, center, and Ilana Drukker Tokotin, center right, who are survivors of the Holocaust who have taken a stand against the war in Gaz.”
“As the country’s most powerful politicians, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, attended a ceremony on Thursday morning at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, three Holocaust survivors in their 80s stood at the entrance holding a sign aloft: “If we have lost our compassion for the other, we have lost our humanity.”
They stood holding photos of Palestinian children who had been killed since the war began. Dozens more lined the roads of the city dressed in black, holding out empty pots to symbolize the starvation of those in Gaza.
In recent months, particularly since the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel collapsed in March, the country has been rocked by protests. These demonstrations have been loudly called for.
Veronika Cohen, 80, a Holocaust survivor who was born in the ghetto in Budapest, said she had come to protest outside Yad Vashem on the day of remembrance because: “I don’t think we can remember our suffering without acknowledging the suffering of Gaza, the deaths of tens of thousands of children, the starvation that’s going on this minute, for which we are partially responsible. It occupies the same place in my heart.She acknowledged that she was in the minority in Israel when it came to speaking up about the terrible cost of the war to Palestinian life. “People here see Palestinians as the other and that’s why they have created a barrier,” she said. “They have managed not to feel their pain and I find that incomprehensible. To me, when I read the stories of their suffering in Gaza, it blends completely into how I feel about the Holocaust.”
Cohen’s eyes filled with tears as she recalled seeing a recent photo of a young Palestinian boy whose arms had been blown off by Israeli missile strikes in Gaza. “The news story said that when he woke up from his operation, the first thing he did was turn to his mother, and he said: ‘how will I hug you now?’ To me, that’s a Holocaust story. And that’s why we are here: to try to awaken people to their pain in any way we can.
Ruth Vleeschhouwer Falak, 89, who survived the Nazi-occupation of the Netherlands as a child, said she was standing there because “in the 1930s, if Germans had stood up loudly against the Nazi party, maybe they wouldn’t have been able to do what they did to us. Speaking up is not a choice for me. The saying is never again; that means never again for anybody. That’s really what we’re standing here for,” added Ilana Drukker Tokotin, 87, who spent her childhood in hiding from the Nazis.”
Yet the few who have tried to bring the voice of Gaza into the anti-war protests have regularly faced fierce resistance, if not outright violence, from police. After the death of more than 500 children in Gaza in the past month alone, Standing Together, a small but growing movement of Israelis and Palestinians, decided to hold an anti-war” protest on Holocaust Memorial Day that was primarily dedicated to the children who had been murdered by Israel in Gaza as well as the Israeli hostages still held captive.” [ii]
We said many times that part of the Israelis will break with Zionism either when Israel will suffer a major military defeat or following the Arab revolution. Israel has lost the war and Hamas won it. Yet this is only non- non-major defeat for Israel; however even this defeat set in motion the sympathy of some Israelis with the Palestinians in Gaza. There is still a distance from the understanding that the road forward is a joint struggle against the Zionist state and its supporters in the Arab state and in the world.
Israel out of Gaza, Lebanon and Syria now!
Release all for all!
For a Palestinian red and free from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[i] https://www.timesofisrael.com/ex-shin-bet-chief-calls-for-non-violent-revolt-at-weekly-anti-government-rally/
[ii] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/25/we-have-lost-our-humanity-holocaust-survivors-call-for-end-to-war-in-gaza