As Ohad stood in Tel Aviv’s Habima Square on Saturday night, it’s safe to say that he disagreed with many of the tens of thousands of others protesting alongside him.
Unlike the centrist and left-wing politicians who headlined the rally, and many attendees, Ohad, who declined to share his last name, is a staunch conservative voter — consistently supporting parties to the right of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
And even though waves of mass protest have coursed through Israel over the past several years, Ohad said he hadn’t attended a demonstration since 2011, when Israelis rallied in opposition to their rising cost of living.
This week, he decided to take to the streets. Since Oct. 7, 2023, he’s spent nearly a year of his life as a military reservist, leaving behind a pregnant wife and two young children. Now at home, he was shocked by recent footage of police using violence and skunk water against people protesting Netanyahu. Footage of police officers breaking the car windows of protesters was the final straw for him.
'Far from democracy'
“That broke me. It really made me angry,” he said. “This isn’t what we’re fighting for. I’m afraid we’re very far from democracy now.”
On Saturday night, he was among the protesters, one of an estimated 200,000 Israelis who gathered in the largest street demonstrations since the Oct. 7 attack. The crowds protested the resumption of the war in Gaza, called for the release of the hostages still held there, and decried Netanyahu’s efforts to remove senior government officials.
The protests have swelled over the past week, show no signs of stopping and come as Israel faces a bevy of entangled political controversies: Netanyahu ended the ceasefire with Hamas last week after two months, and Israel has ramped up its fighting there.
Netanyahu has also fired Ronen Bar, the chief of the Shin Bet intelligence service, citing a loss of confidence in him. The dismissal comes as the Shin Bet is investigating Netanyahu’s office for illicit ties to Qatar, and on Friday, Israel’s Supreme Court froze the firing. Meanwhile, the government is also taking steps to remove Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, whom Netanyahu sees as an adversary.
Those decisions have set the stage for a constitutional crisis. The protesters portray them as an abrogation of the popular will that will endanger the 59 remaining hostages — 24 of whom are thought to be alive — as well as Israel’s democracy.
“Why is it more pressing to hold an emergency meeting to get rid of Ronen Bar than it is to save the hostages?” said Vered, another protester who did not give her last name. “They’re stealing the country and then destroying it in front of our eyes.”
The protests are a successor to the weekly demonstrations that have taken place over much of the war, calling on the government to do more to free the hostages. But while many of those demonstrations drew relatively few people — leaving large portions of Habima Square empty — Saturday’s rallies were far more packed.
While the Tel Aviv protest was larger, protests in Jerusalem — near Netanyahu’s official residence — have also been sustained. On Saturday night, the speakers included Miriam Lapid, a former settler leader who became a symbol of national trauma in 1994 when her husband and son were murdered in the West Bank by a Hamas terrorist.
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Introduced as a “deep ideological right-winger,” Lapid exhorted haredi Orthodox Jews to join the protests. “I want to see everyone at the protests,” she said. “This is not a battle between right and left, that’s true. Someone is leading you astray.”
The only recent demonstrations to draw larger crowds than this weekend’s were the ones in 2023, pre-Oct. 7, against Netanyahu’s effort to weaken the court system. After the Hamas attack, those protests and the groups behind them quickly pivoted to advocating for the hostages.
Labor and tech leaders have threatened to grind Israel’s economy to a halt if Netanyahu disobeys the Supreme Court. On Saturday, Centrist opposition leader Yair Lapid and Yair Golan, who heads a left-wing party and who was tackled to the ground during a recent protest in Jerusalem, both addressed the crowd at Habima. A large screen displayed the message: “Stop the dictatorship mania.”
On stage, Lapid declared, “We’re here to tell Ronen Bar, you’re not alone. We’re here to tell Baharav-Miara, you’re not alone.” At another point, he said, “Netanyahu is openly doing everything to start a civil war.” He called for a “tax revolt” and urging citizens to resist government actions.
That statement came after Netanyahu had tweeted, the previous day, “There will not be a civil war! The state of Israel is a country of laws and, according to the law, the government of Israel decides who will lead the Shin Bet.”
Ohad was not reassured by Netanyahu’s tweet.
“I’m not certain at all that we’re not heading to civil war,” he said. “Maybe we’re already in one. No shots have been fired yet but it’s just a matter of time. Maybe there will be a political assassination, who knows?”
Vered disagreed that civil war is imminent, she said, “because we have far worse things that are happening to us from outside.”
Yael, an anti-war activist wearing a MAGA-inspired red baseball cap that read “End this fuc*!ng war,” said she was disappointed that calls to end the war were not more explicit at the Habima rally.
“For me, the war is the first flag that connects everything – the hostages, democracy, judicial reform – all of it. It’s affecting all of society, it’s changing us for the worse,” she said. “And the government is using the war to control everyone.”
In a parallel demonstration nearby at Hostages Square, calls to halt the fighting in Gaza and secure the hostages’ release did take center stage. People stepped to the side to make a path for released American-Israeli hostages Keith Siegel and his wife Aviva to walk through the square.
“Seeing them and some of the other hostages who got out was very moving,” said Debbie Amichai, who came to the demonstration from the Tel Aviv suburb of Herzliya. “But their sorrow and anger was absolutely palpable. The feeling that no one’s listening to them. It felt so urgent and so painful and so tragic. It made you angry and sad at the same time. It was just overwhelmingly sad, overwhelmingly frustrating, overwhelmingly anger-making.”
On Friday, dozens of released hostages and their family members signed an open letter calling on the war to stop so that the remaining hostages could be saved.
“Stop the fighting, return to the negotiating table and fully complete an agreement that will bring back the rest of the hostages,” the letter says. “Even at the price of ending the war. “Military pressure endangers them and nothing is more urgent than the return of all the hostages.”
The legacy of Oct. 7 overshadowed the protests. Some protesters carried a banner reading, “Ronen Bar, we’re with you and will protect you.” Yet among protesters, opinions on Bar were divided. Vered supported him for negotiating deals to release many of the hostages, while others hold him responsible for the Oct. 7 attack.
Yoni, who traveled from the central city of Yehud and has attended protests in major cities in recent weeks, said that while he came out to “show his support for the Supreme Court and attorney general,” and vehemently opposed Bar’s firing, he still believed Bar had to leave his position.
“He’s guilty for what happened on Oct. 7, and he must go. But so must Netanyahu,” Yoni said. “Where in the world have you ever heard of someone who is being investigated firing his investigator?”
Like Ohad, Yoni identified as right-leaning, “more right-wing than Bibi.” But he maintained that while he wanted to see Hamas defeated, the return of the hostages took precedence. “We can’t think about crushing Hamas before the hostages are home.”
Ben Rigler, who had previously attended protests of the judicial overhaul but had stayed away since Oct. 7, said his sense of urgency had grown recently.
“I realized I have no choice,” he said. “Our democracy is dying. This is the last minute before we become a dictatorship.”
At Begin Road, Ori Tsarfati likewise said he was protesting to “keep Israel democratic and liberal.” He worried that the government was restructuring state institutions to keep Netanyahu in power.
“I don’t know what their vision is, but it’s clear that it won’t be a state founded on the Declaration of Independence,” he said.
Some protesters looked to the United States for intervention. Yoni said he believed President Donald Trump was the only person who could effectively pressure Netanyahu. (The Trump administration is engaged in an effort of its own to constrain the U.S. judiciary.)
“Trump, not Bibi, made the hostage deal happen. He bypassed Bibi and made all the decisions,” he said, referring to the beginning of the ceasefire in January, which saw dozens of hostages released and which many observers credited in part to Trump. “He can do the same now by telling Bibi, ‘What are you doing?’ The public isn’t with you.’”
He added, “I understand that Trump would hesitate to get involved, but sadly there’s no choice.”
