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Why write about the Israeli Left? A Left that has been unable to oppose a destructive, genocidal war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip lasting almost two years — a war with an official death toll of over 60,000 and an ever-deepening famine that is now spreading? A Left that has clearly failed to offer Israeli society a vision and a political program, an alternative to the thirst for revenge that gripped the public after the shock of 7 October 2023? A Left that draws the attention of progressive forces in Europe, yet at home is completely decimated and fighting for its very survival?
First and foremost, it is their steadfastness, their adherence to principles, and their perseverance that offer an anchor point for escaping the pull of normalizing and trivializing “our genocide” (the title of a recently published investigative report by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem).
Gil Shohat directs the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Israel Office in Tel Aviv.
It must also be noted that in recent weeks something has shifted in the internal Israeli perception of the apocalyptic situation in the Gaza Strip. This shift is not only due to the growing exhaustion and despair of the Israeli hostage families after nearly 700 days of hope and fear, or to the rising number of soldiers dying — clearly in the service of the long-dreamed-of and now seemingly within-reach ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip envisioned by far-right ministers. The famine in the Gaza Strip, caused by Israel and still partly denied, is also increasingly — far too late — attracting the attention of broader segments of the liberal civil society.
Demonstrations are becoming more frequent, slogans more pointed, and the suffering of the Palestinians is slowly finding its way into the dominant liberal circles of the protest movement against the Netanyahu government and in favor of a ceasefire.
In this regard, Benjamin Netanyahu has failed. By opening another front in the ongoing regional conflict with Iran, he sought to stifle the protest movement against his politics of endless destruction in the Gaza Strip, the sacrifice of Israeli hostages for the sake of his own political survival, and the deepening societal polarization. While the twelve-day war with Iran did receive support from large parts of Jewish Israeli society — despite unprecedented destruction in metropolitan areas such as Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva from Iranian ballistic missiles — it has also pushed large parts of the population to the brink of exhaustion. This is reflected in the sharp rise in demand for psychological care since then. A “return to normality,” as declared by the Israeli authorities the day after the ceasefire with Iran on 24 June, is simply impossible for many people in Israel given the strain of the past two years.
Meanwhile, the protest camp, which had been in a state of extreme exhaustion, has been reinvigorated. Demonstrations are becoming more frequent, slogans more pointed, and the suffering of the Palestinians is slowly finding its way into the dominant liberal circles of the protest movement against the Netanyahu government and in favor of a ceasefire.
At the same time, the scale of what two Israeli human rights organizations — B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel — have recently for the first time described as genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza is gradually making its way into Israeli news broadcasts. Since 7 October 2023, these broadcasts have contributed to the isolation of large parts of Jewish Israeli society through their self-centered focus solely on Israeli suffering (which certainly exists) to the exclusion of all else.
Actions once deemed too radical are now entering the mainstream of the protest movement.
In Israeli academia, there are (finally) signs of movement as well. Following the “Black Flag Campaign” initiated by mid-level faculty members, the rectors of five major Israeli universities (including Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) sent an open letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu in late July, sharply condemning the famine in Gaza and calling for a ceasefire. In response, Education Minister Yoav Kisch accused them of spreading Hamas propaganda.
On the streets of Israel, this slowly shifting awareness is visible in the return of near-daily anti-government protests. Since the provisional ceasefire with Iran, the demonstrations have increasingly, since early July, referred to the government’s responsibility for worsening the famine in the Gaza Strip. The call from progressive organizations to reject “normality” in the face of this apocalypse is growing louder.
In mid-July, for the first time, a demonstration took place in the center of Tel Aviv where thousands marched through the city holding images of children who had died from hunger. The demonstrators were clearly ahead of the speakers, who were still focused on military aims, Israel’s reputation, and the failure to achieve war goals. That changed just a week later when, again, several thousand demonstrators explicitly protested against the starvation of Gaza — this time with the support of initiatives that had previously avoided such slogans, such as “Soldiers for Hostages” and the “High-Tech Protest Movement.” The fact that activists are now marching in large numbers through Israeli streets with such images is surely also due to the earlier work of radical left-wing groups like the Radical Bloc TLV, which since spring 2024 has been drawing attention to the horrific number of children killed by Israel in the Gaza Strip — currently estimated at 20,000 — through photo flash mobs. Actions once deemed too radical are now entering the mainstream of the protest movement.
For the first time in nearly 22 months, there are signs that the deep-seated suppression of the apocalyptic fate of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is beginning to crack.
At the end of July, according to organizers, more than 10,000 people gathered in the Palestinian city of Sakhnin in northern Israel — mostly Palestinian but also many Jewish citizens of Israel — to protest against the starvation and destruction of Gaza, despite immense state repression against its Palestinian citizens since October 2023.
The Sakhnin protest was followed the next week by a three-day hunger strike called by the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel, the highest political body of the country’s Palestinian citizens. Among those participating were Palestinian Knesset member Aida Touma-Sliman, committee chair Mohammed Barakeh, and Jewish Israelis in solidarity. The strike center in Jaffa became a hub for numerous events focusing on solidarity with the starving people of Gaza.
For the first time in nearly 22 months, there are signs that the deep-seated suppression of the apocalyptic fate of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip — still prevalent in much of the remaining liberal Jewish Israeli society — is beginning to crack. This is, despite the abysses of the current situation, a small ray of hope in what otherwise seems like an endless series of catastrophic developments.
What, then, could explain why larger segments of Israeli society — though by no means enough people — have “woken up”? Alongside war fatigue from the ongoing conflict on multiple fronts and the impossibility of keeping the reality in Gaza at a distance, the increasingly authoritarian policies of the Israeli government are surely another reason.
Convincing people of this political insight must be the true aim of a universalist Left committed to indivisible justice and equality for all people in Israel and Palestine.
A recent example is the failed attempt to expel longtime Knesset member Ayman Odeh, which was accompanied by an unprecedented smear campaign from both government and opposition politicians and led in mid-July to violent attacks by far-right Jewish Israelis against Odeh. In addition, the ongoing work by coalition politicians on a law to restrict the political activities of Israeli NGOs that receive funding from foreign state-funded institutions has, in recent weeks, sparked outrage even in more liberal political circles.
It is slowly dawning on more people that the Netanyahu coalition’s authoritarian domestic policy is rooted in the messianic redemption vision underlying the 58-year policy of occupation and displacement in the West Bank (and potentially soon again in the Gaza Strip). Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard describes this process in a recently published book on internal occupation: “The goal is to complete a process that has advanced consistently for over five and a half decades: implanting the West Bank into the Israeli state body while simultaneously entrenching Jewish supremacy.”
Convincing people of this political insight must be the true aim of a universalist Left committed to indivisible justice and equality for all people in Israel and Palestine — and must go hand in hand with mobilization against the starvation and destruction of Gaza. It can do so effectively only in a Jewish-Palestinian alliance — making it all the more essential for the Left here to engage with their actions and to maintain solidarity with their work.
This article first appeared in nd.aktuell in cooperation with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Translated by Max Böhnel and Paul Garver.
