For years, I have been avoiding demonstrations in Tel Aviv. I have never attended demonstrations in Jerusalem. Both because I was concerned about the harshness of the traffic, and because I was afraid of the violence of people with very different perspectives. I can certainly say that I am more concerned about my comfort and more afraid of violence than I am concerned and afraid about what will happen to the State of Israel. Dictatorship? Theocracy? I’ve seen worse things than that in my personal life. Will they arrest me and torture me to death? Oh, well, how much worse is that than what my mother went through in her last years, with her poor health. Furthermore, I am not a big believer in the power of protests. I have seen what happened with the 2011 protest. Still, when it works out for me, when I think I can get something out of it, I participate in political demonstrations. That’s how I got to Tel-Aviv’s Climate March in 2019 and in 2022. Hence, heaving read in the WhatsApp group of our former group of travelersthat a protest rally against the anti-liberal legislation is going to take place in the main square of my town, I suggested to my beloved partner that we go. It is a five minutes’ walk from the house, and the people are mostly in the political center. Thus, we started going every Saturday night. It is a fixed weekday, a fixed time, after sunset (so the sun does not burn), it does not coincide with our work schedules. Three times returned home after an hour, before the end of the event. On the fourth time, we stayed until the end, because we were there with my older sisters and brother-in-law. That made the time go faster.
Each Saturday night, we met people we knew: colleagues, former colleagues, friends we hadn’t met in a long time, people I know from folk dances classes, co-counsellors and former co-counsellors. My partner and I would traverse the busy square like we do in Independence Day night gatherings, until we would meet someone we could talk to, and then we stopped. Usually, the conversations were not about the situation in the country, rather small talks about our personal lives. This is mainly a protest of the Israeli secular middle class, although it was scheduled to take place after Shabbat, probably so that liberal religious people could come. I was discouraged by the small number of visibly Orthodox Jews among the protesters. There were some among the speakers, including people from settlements in the west bank. Some of them complained about the attitude they get from center-left protesters in previous civil society events that they had attended (e.g. after the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin). Those were speakers that moved me the most. I noticed a larger presence of non-white people among the protesters, although still an under-representation, considering their share in the general population. Apparently, they were middle class people. Elders were over-represented. But many elders were accompanied by their children and grandchildren with them. It felt like an event for families. There was that atmosphere.
Of course, much of the time the loudspeakers echoed voices of speakers with agendas other than defending liberal democracy: environmental activists, activists for rights of the people with disabilities, activists for LGBT rights, and yeah, activists for the liberation of Palestinians, aka “ending the occupation”. Activists from women’s liberation where particularly visible: they wore red T-shirts with slogans on them. At every demonstration, there was a march of women wearing an outfit taken from the TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale”: a white veil and a red cloak. I asked an activist I know and met there, what she would think of a man wearing the printed red T-shirt, would that be considered an appropriation. She said no. But then again, she’s not a radical, so I decided not count on her reply, and have not yet bought that T-shirt. Surprisingly for me, unlike in the 2011 protest, those with particular agendas haven’t take over the discourse in 2023 protest. The main speakers were all mainstream people, and there are no attacks on the leadership yet.
I am glad that the protest is not related to a particular person, there are no leaders who repeatedly appear on television and recognized. That way, it is not too easy to attack them and make up lies about them. My feeling is that there is a leadership, but it stays in the background. I am assuming that the leadership is made up of people who have done some things in their lives other than protests, and because of that, they sense the general public, and their steps are considered and measured. This relates to a recent re-evaluation I have made: I am attracted pragmatism.
I felt sorry for the policemen, who were required to do a night shift securing the demonstration, instead of spending the last moments of Shabbat with their families. At the demonstration in our town, policemen didn’t have too much work to do. There was no violence. I have an office mate who supports Netanyahu and has a son-in-law who is a policeman, he has been complaining a lot about that to me. But of course, he doesn’t like the protest regardless of the family context.
There were days when the demonstrations disrupted my life too: I work in Tel Aviv, and every such day I had to walk a long distance to find a bus to take me home, because some main streets in Tel-Aviv were blocked. Good thing it was the end of winter, so the weather was still bearable. The few buses that made it through the blocked streets were packed, as were the stations. But I told myself time and time again, don’t feel sorry for yourself, the protesters in Iran are suffering more than you in their struggle for democracy.
Eventually, when our eternal prime minister announced the delay of the legislation, I found myself hoping that the protest would still continue. These demonstrations in our town’s square are probably the closest thing I will ever experience to a synagogue in an Eastern European town before the war, or to a Jewish community center in the West: you come, you walk around the crowd, you get the vibes, you listen to what is said on the stage, you don’t necessarily agree with everything that is being said, but you feel connected to the passion and the good will of the speakers. Then, when you get tired, or bored, or too restimulated, you walk home.
My path to re-emergence 