In a move that electrified Israelis, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on Nov. 5, the day of the U.S. presidential election. The announcement came five minutes before the main evening news broadcasts at 8 p.m., timing that commentators said was a transparent attempt to divert the public’s attention from a scandal, still under a partial gag order, involving allegations that a staff member in the prime minister’s office leaked classified military documents to foreign media outlets. Five people were arrested, with a police spokesperson saying the matter was “a breach of national security.” The timing was also significant in that Netanyahu surely knew that the U.S. government would be far too busy with election day events to respond to yet another of his manufactured crises.
Prominent political analysts decried the motives and timing of Gallant’s dismissal, with Haaretz’s Yossi Verter describing Netanyahu’s move as “dangerous” and “terrifying,” while Channel 13’s Raviv Druker called it “cynical” and “dark.” Gallant is not known for his liberal views; he is a veteran member of Likud whose politics do not veer significantly from those of Netanyahu or his far-right coalition. The now-former defense minister is perhaps best known internationally for announcing on Oct. 8, 2023, that he had cut Gaza’s access to electricity and water. But he has had several clashes with the prime minister over his handling of the war in Gaza and is now, as he said in a Nov. 5 televised statement, at odds with Netanyahu over three major issues — enforcing military conscription of ultra-Orthodox Israelis, negotiating a deal for the release of the hostages and establishing an official inquiry into the security failures of Oct. 7, 2023.
The Supreme Court ruled in June that the long-standing exemption from conscription for ultra-Orthodox men must end, but the ultra-Orthodox parties have said they would leave the coalition and bring the government down if Netanyahu were to enforce the ruling. Netanyahu has rejected calls for a commission of inquiry and for a negotiated deal to bring home the hostages, on the ground that a cease-fire would prevent “total victory” in Gaza.
Almost as soon as the announcement of Gallant’s dismissal was reported, Israelis poured onto the streets of Tel Aviv to protest. They brought traffic to a halt by blocking major arteries, built bonfires, blew whistles, chanted slogans and waved hastily made homemade signs with slogans like, “We deserve a better leader.” There were calls for civil society to go on strike for a day.
The fear of these Israeli protesters was that by removing Gallant in the middle of a two-front war in Gaza and Lebanon, and amid a widely perceived threat of imminent war with Iran, Netanyahu was signaling that he had decided to abandon the hostages to their fate while surrounding himself with loyalists. This, of course, is a basic move in the authoritarian playbook: Get rid of the dissenters and surround yourself with people who only qualify for their jobs by virtue of their unquestioning loyalty.
On X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram, Hebrew language users on the ground in Tel Aviv were posting photos and videos of massive protests and several incidents of police violence, including one that involved shoving a member of the Knesset hard enough to make him fall. But while social media gave the impression that the country was on fire, the major television networks were not covering the protests at all. Instead, they were providing saturation coverage of the U.S. elections. The commentators arrayed around the table in the television news studios were offering their analysis of the campaigns and their predictions of who would win. Even the channels with a liberal editorial position seemed implicitly satisfied to predict a victory for Donald Trump; polls showed that 66% of Israeli Jews wanted him to win, based on the perception that he was more strongly pro-Israel than President Joe Biden. This is in stark contrast to the views of Jews in the U.S., over 75% of whom voted for Kamala Harris.
The political gap between Israeli and American Jews is a subject for another article. But how to explain the cognitive dissonance between the calm in Israel’s television news studios and the cacophony on the burning streets of Tel Aviv? The most likely explanation is a combination of crisis fatigue and chaos overload. Israelis have been demonstrating in their tens of thousands for more than two years — first to protest the government’s plan to end the Supreme Court’s independence and then to demand a negotiated deal to bring home the hostages. Their tactics have not moved the government to alter its plans by a millimeter.
Netanyahu and his ministers have demonstrated that they are completely unmoved by the demonstrations and indifferent to the agony of the hostages’ families, most of whom they perceive as allied with Israel’s liberal Ashkenazi elite. The slide toward authoritarianism is picking up speed, with a desperate opposition unable to come up with a strategy to topple the prime minister from his chair. Netanyahu continues to do whatever he needs to stay in power, including prolonging the war in Gaza indefinitely, while Israeli Jews are now almost evenly divided between those who support him and those who oppose him (opponents include a segment of the population roughly comparable to never-Trump Republicans). The people demonstrating on the streets look and sound desperate because they are. They grew up in a country with a highly communal national ethos that gave them the feeling their voices counted. Now they feel abandoned, helpless and terrified.
Netanyahu, however, is having a good week. In a tweet illustrated with a photo showing him standing with his wife Sara next to Trump, all three smiling broadly, he wrote: “Dear Donald and Melania Trump, Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback! Your historic return to the White House offers a new beginning for America and a powerful recommitment to the great alliance between Israel and America. This is a huge victory! In true friendship, yours, Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu.”
From one authoritarian to another.
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