I thought this recent Graeme Wood column in The Atlantic on the situation on the ground in Israel was interesting. An excerpt:
On Sunday night in Jerusalem, near the Knesset, the crowd of 50,000 protesters alternated between moroseness and fury. It was, especially for Jerusalem, a secular crowd. I stood next to two young women smoking a joint, which probably took the edge off the fury. All were united in leveling a charge against Netanyahu: that he would rather hold together his coalition of zealots than cut a deal, even one that would bring hostages home. The fury reached an apex when the mayor of Jerusalem, Moshe Lion, tried to speak. He is a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party but stuck to nonpartisan bromides. Still, the crowd shouted him down because of the association. When he persisted, one of the young women next to me took the joint out of her mouth and spat on the ground.
Netanyahu could extract a kind of disgusted gratitude from these protesters if he offered a deal with Hamas (and the group, in an uncharacteristically conciliatory mood, agreed to it). To some in the crowd, the terms of that deal seemed literally not to matter, because, as one sign read, no price is too high. Surely not everyone in the crowd would go that far. But the hooting and heckling suggested they thought that Netanyahu had empowered negotiators too little, and that he was ultimately responsible for securing a deal, even a temporary one. In addition to repatriating hostages, a deal would allow time to negotiate a more durable peace and avoid a possible Gaza-as-Somalia scenario (lawlessness, warlordism, and endless civilian misery) if Israel continues to drift forward with no obvious plan.
If accepting a deal imperils Netanyahu’s good graces on the right, rejecting a remotely plausible one would probably doom him and his government because of the wrath of the center and the left. They believe that more of the hostages—who have now spent six months in darkness or fending off rapists—would be home already if Netanyahu had told his more extreme colleagues to go pout. Right-wing support has long since reached its apex, and the government is already weak. Public outrage might finally destroy it. The question of who would replace it is, remarkably, almost an afterthought. Whoever comes next could not possibly be worse.
Adam noted a while back that the massive anti-Netanyahu protests taking place prior to the Hamas atrocities weren’t a sign of a healthy democracy but instead signaled the opposite. Tens of thousands were taking to the streets, reservists refusing to serve, etc., to protest Netanyahu’s authoritarian power grab via judicial “reform.”
It’s a more existential struggle now. The protesters want to throw their rotten government out for catastrophic incompetence and prioritizing retaining power over the country’s interests. I hope they prevail.
Open thread.
