Demonstrators, in Habima Square in Tel Aviv on Saturday July 26, carrying signs with the name, age, photo, or drawing of a flower in memory of each Palestinian child killed in Gaza
“We don’t have spare children! Enough! This must stop!” These were some of the slogans shouted by fathers and mothers of soldiers deployed in Gaza—some since October 7—during a demonstration held on Thursday, July 24, at Habima Theater Square in Tel Aviv, calling for an end to the war before a crowd estimated at over 10,000 people.
Twenty-five years ago, it was the action of four other mothers who had lost their sons in what will go down in history as the First Lebanon War that led Ehud Barak, newly elected head of the Israeli government in the 1999 elections, to unilaterally withdraw Israeli forces overnight from Lebanon, where they had been deployed since June 1982. These four mothers had gathered regularly for years at a crossroads on the route taken by convoys heading to Lebanon, holding signs to denounce a war that, over 18 years, claimed the lives of 675 Israeli soldiers and nearly 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians and militiamen.
Twenty-five years later, after 657 days since October 7 and nearly 900 deaths and thousands of injuries in the Israeli army, are we witnessing a turning point in Israeli public opinion? Will the cries of these parents demanding an end to the war be heard by a government concerned solely with its own survival? In any case, polls, week after week, show that this is the demand of the vast majority of the Israeli population.
The families of the hostages were also present on Thursday night at the podium, holding photos of their children still detained in Gaza’s tunnels. One of the mothers addressed the crowd, calling for an immediate agreement and the release of all the hostages at once. And the crowd responded in unison, as they do at every protest, “You are not alone, we are with you!”
Noam Tibon was the master of ceremonies for the demonstration. Noam Tibon is a retired major general, one of the heroes of October 7, known across the country for coming from Tel Aviv to save his son and his family, who had barricaded themselves for ten hours in their apartment shelter at Kibbutz Nahal Oz, near the Gaza border, while being surrounded by Hamas terrorists. After listening to all the testimonies and two prayers specially written by two fathers who lost their sons during the war, Noam Tibon concluded with an appeal to the public, saying that this was just the beginning of the fight and that everyone must be ready to mobilize everywhere.
The previous day, another gathering was held at Hostages’ Square. Psychologists and psychiatrists, who work with people who have experienced traumatic events, came to testify and, above all, to call for an end to this war, which no longer has any purpose and brings only death and destruction to both populations.
In all these demonstrations, as in the one held Saturday evening, as every week in several cities across the country, an entire people is mobilizing. In Tel Aviv, thousands of people cross paths in the streets, moving from one square to another where rallies are taking place. Many wear T-shirts with slogans reflecting the various sentiments within the crowd. Some call for the return of the hostages, others demand an end to the war, others call for elections or for the establishment of a national commission of inquiry to determine responsibility for the October 7 disaster… Saturday more than a thousand people held signs bearing the name of a Palestinian child killed in Gaza, their age, their photo, or a drawn flower. Many slogans denounced this senseless and deadly war. The major Israeli media are finally beginning to talk about the famine in Gaza and to show those terrible images of a population scrambling for a bag of rice, images that are being broadcast in a loop on screens around the world. But these media also show other images—those of Hamas diverting part of this food aid for its own benefit, using the heartbreaking images of a starving population to sway global opinion and further damage, if that is even possible, Israel’s image worldwide.
This population that has been demonstrating for more than three years—initially against the judicial reform and now against the war—faces another segment of the population, less visible in the streets but holding the reins of power. A group that, slowly but systematically, is expanding its grip on the country, advancing settlement projects in the West Bank, sometimes violently expelling Palestinians from their lands, destroying their olive trees, or decimating their herds. The army, sometimes present during these events, rarely intervenes. Yet it shares security control in the West Bank with the police, which is under the authority of Ben Gvir, the minister who encourages these settler abuses.
Two peoples, then. Two Israels facing each other, with two worldviews and two different value systems. That is the real fracture in the country, and the outcome of this increasingly inevitable confrontation will determine the future of the country, the Jewish people, and the entire region.
On one side are those referred to as the “Messianists”—people who believe there is an ultimate purpose to historical events, the arrival of a messianic era with the prospect of Jewish control over the entire land of Israel, even at the cost of a war that would become eternal. For these “Messianists,” every event—from the last century to today—fits into this narrative: the founding of the country by secular pioneers breaking away from the religious communities from which they came and which continued to await the Messiah’s arrival; the Shoah, which by exterminating six million Jews, pressured Western countries, burdened by guilt over their own responsibility in the tragedy, to support the establishment of Israel on the international stage; the Six-Day War, which enabled control over the entire land of Israel; even the massacre of October 7 is interpreted through this lens, seen as an opportunity to return to Gaza and expel the Palestinians.
And on the other side are all those who identify with the values and foundations upon which this country was built—those who find resonance in the text of the 1948 Declaration of Independence, each affirming in their own way their attachment to their Jewish and Zionist identity while embracing the ideals of freedom and human rights upon which democracies rest. Among them are secular and religious people, Jews or their descendants from all diaspora communities, as well as Arabs and other minorities, all Israeli citizens, committed to these ideals of freedom and tolerance.
We cannot remain indifferent to this fracture between the two Israels. We must take part in this debate, to fight against the deadly vision of these Messianists, whose logic mirrors, albeit with an opposing objective, that of the Islamists.
Last Wednesday, during the psychologists’ demonstration, psychoanalyst Merav Roth concluded her speech by addressing, in English, all the critics of the State of Israel worldwide, asking them “to stop conflating the entire Israeli population with its leaders and to come fight with us against this government.” She then quoted Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who, returning from the Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama in March 1965 alongside Martin Luther King during the civil rights movement, wrote in his diary, “Today I prayed with my feet.” She concluded that “we too must pray with our feet, with our actions, that every action matters.”
So, equip yourselves with good shoes and get ready to walk—here, in Europe, as in Israel. The road is still long. But we will not abandon all those who are fighting in Israel for a different future.
David Chemla
