Ariel Schalit/AP Photo
People take part in a protest calling for a deal for immediate release of hostages held in the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group, in Tel Aviv, Israel, September 1, 2024.
Some wars end, or come close to ending, when the citizenry, or the military, or both compel their own government to stop the fighting. Such was the case in World War I, when Russian troops deserted en masse even before the Bolsheviks took power; when German sailors refused orders to engage the superior British fleet so that their admirals could claim to have at least tried to stem the impending defeat—a mutiny that mushroomed to the point that the Kaiser had to abdicate; when entire divisions of French soldiers in 1917 refused to leave their trenches to be mowed down by German machine guns. Only in the French case did the government overcome the resistance and continue to prosecute the war.
And such was the case in our own war in Vietnam, where stateside opposition to a war that increasingly appeared unwinnable despite heavy American casualties eventually compelled the withdrawal of U.S. troops.
But you might search in vain to find an instance where serious opposition to a war that by conventional standards was being won overwhelmingly nonetheless arose and mobilized huge demonstrations in much of the nation. At least, until the past few days in Israel.
There, roughly half a million Israelis demonstrated, went on strike, or closed their businesses to protest the Netanyahu government’s refusal to agree to a cease-fire in the Gaza war that would bring home the remaining hostages held by Hamas. (As the Jewish population of Israel is roughly one-fortieth the size of the U.S. population, the turnout of 500,000 protesters there would be the equivalent of 20 million Americans taking to the streets here.)
I wish I could say that most of the demonstrators were protesting the government’s determination to render unlivable every neighborhood, homestead, nook, and cranny where Palestinians had resided, a policy that has led Israel to kill roughly 40,000 Palestinians in the process. I don’t doubt that some of the demonstrators were resolutely opposed to that policy, and likely also believed that the goal of completely eliminating Hamas was a chimera; that waging the war the way their government was waging the war would inevitably produce a new generation of Palestinians with the same ends-justify-the-means ethos as Hamas or Israel’s own ultranationalists. I suspect most of the demonstrators, though, simply believed it was more important to get the hostages back than to continue a war that Netanyahu didn’t want to end, for fear that the war’s cessation would splinter his coalition, bring down his government, and place him yet again in legal jeopardy. Or, to put it more bluntly, that he’d decided that the hostages had to lose their lives as the price for preserving his own political life.
Bibi’s ostensible sticking point keeping him from agreeing to a cease-fire is his unwillingness to end the Israeli army’s occupation of the portion of Gaza that runs along its border with Egypt. His own defense minister, Yoav Gallant, says that the army can protect Israel’s interests without having to station a force there, and that the real effect of Bibi’s position is simply to obstruct a cease-fire—that is, to obstruct both a release of the hostages and the collapse of Bibi’s government, as the ultranationalist parties propping it up would leave unless the war somehow dragged on until it enabled them to drive every last Palestinian not just from Gaza but from the West Bank as well.
Fearing a postwar day of reckoning over the government’s responsibility for letting the October 7 massacres happen, everyone in Bibi’s Cabinet (except Gallant) and his coalitional majority in the Knesset needs the war to continue. The rank and file of the settler parties and the ultra-Orthodox are with them, as are just enough other Israelis who still believe continuing the war will somehow eradicate Hamas (a belief not shared by Israel’s military leaders). So the divisions over Bibi’s opposition to any cease-fire now reflect the nation’s pre-existing divisions that flared up last year over the Israeli right’s attempt to take over the country’s courts. In that pre–October 7 instance, the country’s left—largely secular, rooted in traditions of Western democracy, and plainly opposed to the nation’s drift toward pre-Enlightenment orthodoxy and primitive tribalism—had enough heft to delay the judiciary’s neutering. It lacked the power to bring down the government, however, and lacks it still today.
Back in the 1990s, I wrote that a real Israel-Palestine solution required not a two-state solution but a four-state one: Two for the Israeli side, and two for the Palestinians (thinking then of the PLO-Fatah side and the more extreme rejectionist side, since which Bibi has worked incessantly to weaken the former). The liberal modernists on each side could have their state, and so could the sectarian ultranationalists. Since then, the main object of Bibi’s statecraft has turned out to be the weakening of both the Jewish and Palestinian liberal modernist camps.
If his war on Gaza (and now the West Bank) drags on endlessly—as appears to be his goal—the ranks of the Israeli opposition may yet grow. The remaining hostages will still be held; more will turn up dead; the Israeli economy will weaken as the reservists who make up its army won’t be able to return to their civilian jobs; international opprobrium will only increase. A shift in U.S. policy that bans the sale of offensive weapons to Israel may hasten the war’s end; but it’s really only the Israeli public who can halt it. At some point, they will: Every unending war eventually ends. Let’s hope it comes before thousands more are killed by Israel’s sectarian nationalists and a prime minister who clings to power only through their support.
