It is thought to be the biggest set of demonstrations since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

Thousands gathered in Tel Aviv to demand that the extremist government of Binyamin Netanyahu strike a deal to exchange Palestinians held prisoner in Israel (many of them held without charge or trial) for hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Fascist Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich appears to have spoken for the government last week when he said that rescuing the over 100 hostages “is not the most important thing.”

The police also pushed back a crowd attempting to block the Ayalon Lanes intercity freeway at Tel Aviv.

Elsewhere in the city, thousands gathered, among them families with a member held hostage in Gaza. They raised placards demanding an exchange-of-prisoners deal and the release of Israeli hostages.

At the residence of Israeli President Isaac Herzog in the Tzahala neighborhood of Tel Aviv, hundreds came out to demand immediate elections. Netanyahu is widely hated in Israel, and only 17% in polls say they would vote for his Likud Party again.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Israel anti-govt protests: Demonstrators call for an early election”

Numerous other towns and cities also witnessed demonstrations.

A similar small rally for new elections was held in Beersheba.

In Jerusalem, about a thousand people participated in a protest march, also demanding a hostage deal, as well as new elections. They proceeded from the prime minister’s residence to Paris Square.

Hundreds also protested at Caesarea, closing the main drag and edging toward a residence in the city owned by Netanyahu. Police detained a woman for investigation.

Haaretz adds that the protesters in Tel Aviv were carrying torches and marching toward the Defense Headquarters when the water cannon was unleashed on them. The center-left newspaper quotes a protest leader as saying, “The police created this mess. The number of protesters was not greater than in previous weeks. When they activated the water cannon … they turned it into a significant event that drew people.”

MSNBC Video: Israeli Hostage speaks out against Netanyahu: “‘They just left us there to die’: Israeli hostage held in Gaza shares experience

Haaretz also says that of the 400 demonstrators in Beersheba, 100 were family members of two Israelis of Palestinian heritage (presumably Druze) who were being held in Gaza. It reports, “Shaban al-Sayed, the father of Hisham al-Sayed, who has been held by Hamas since 2015, and Ali Alziadna, the brother of Yosef Alziadna, who is currently being held hostage by Hamas, and uncle of released hostage Bilal Alziadna, spoke at the protest.”

Haaretz also quotes a family member of a hostage at a small demonstration in Haifa as saying that the Netanyahu government and its “deranged messianic envoys” are making enemies of the families of the hostages.

Huge weekly demonstrations against the Netanyahu government had roiled Israel before the Hamas attack.

She quotes him as saying, “There is an apartheid state here. In a territory where two people are judged under two legal systems, that is an apartheid state.”

Tamir Pardo, roughly 69, served as the head of Mossad from 2011 to 2016. He is no leftist or bleeding heart liberal, but an exemplar of the tough, pragmatic and somewhat ruthless Israeli tradition of security officials. He once observed that Mossad is a criminal organization with a license and that is what makes it fun. I suspect the same thing can be said about most external intelligence organizations, including MI6 and the CIA.

Goldenberg added, “Pardo said that as Mossad chief, he repeatedly warned Netanyahu that he needed to decide what Israel’s borders were, or risk the destruction of a state for the Jews . . . Pardo warned that if Israel doesn’t set borders between it and the Palestinians, Israel’s existence as a Jewish state will be in danger.”

What he means is that if the extremists in the current government of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu succeed in their goal of annexing the occupied Palestinian territories, they will willy nilly make 5 million Palestinians Israeli citizens. Taking the land without the people and keeping the indigenous Palestinians stateless is the very definition of Apartheid. The only way to regularize and make legitimate such an annexation would be to give Palestinians citizenship. But if they were added to the nearly 2 million Israelis of Palestinian heritage, that would make about 7 million Palestinian-Israelis versus 7 million Jewish Israelis. Pardo’s point is that Israel would no longer be a Jewish state under those circumstances but a multi-ethnic one, like Belgium or Lebanon.

The Jewish Power and Religious Zionism extremists in the government, I think, hope to chase the Palestinians away to Jordan, creating a large new wave of refugees. I’m not sure, though, that such a thing is possible now, as it had been in 1948 and 1967. Jordan’s army would try to stop it. If such expulsion or “transfer” succeeded, it would likely make Jordan unstable, with highly negative security implications for Israel. And of course such an expulsion of the Palestinians would be a major war crime that might well lead to sanctions on Israel.

Pardo supports the massive protests that have roiled Israel since January, and which aim to pressure PM Netanyahu to back off his plan to neuter the country’s High Court. Pardo also, like many Israelis, despises the Jewish Power and Religious Zionism zealots who now control key cabinet posts. He said in a radio interview in late July, “Someone took the Ku Klux Klan and brought it into the government.” The someone was of course Netanyahu, as Pardo acknowledged.

He even went so far as implicitly to compare Bezalel Smotrich’s call for the Palestinian village of Huwara to be wiped out to the mass parties of the 1930s, including, presumably, the Nazis.

He said the government’s rules allowing Jewish communities to exclude Palestinian-Israelis were “antisemitic:” “Tomorrow morning, they can’t enter a club, or a locality, or can’t buy a house in a certain area, or have less rights, that is antisemitism for its own sake.” I think his point was that Arabs are also Semites, and were being discriminated against on racial grounds.

Jonathan Shamir at Haaretz wrote, of Pardo’s revelations in his radio interview with Kan, “When Pardo confronted Netanyahu with the fact that Israel ‘rules from the [Mediterranean] sea to the [river] Jordan, and in practice, holds Gaza as the largest open air prison in the world,’ he said he was never met with any substantive response. ‘His vision [on this issue] is the vision of Smotrich,’Pardo charged.”

Pardo worried about an exodus of physicians, the hi tech sector, and academics from Israel, without which, he said, “we won’t have a country anymore” or it will become a third world state. He also worries about the military and Mossad being weakened by the increasing number of Israeli refuseniks who decline to serve.

Pardo not only had a long career in the Mossad, starting in 1980, but also was detailed to the Israeli Defense Forces for a while, and worked briefly in the tech sector himself. In 2011-2016 while heading Mossad, he came into conflict with Netanyahu over the prime minister’s plans to launch a unilateral attack on Iran without parliamentary approval. On the other hand, Pardo has lobbied the international community hard to stop Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.

So he isn’t saying that Israel is an Apartheid state, or that it keeps Gaza as an open air prison, or that the Israeli extremist parties are the KKK because he is a Marxist or has studied intersectionality. He is saying these things because as a former security official, he sees them as dire security threats to Israel.

The problem he points to, however, of not having settled borders and not really wanting them goes back to David Ben-Gurion. As Israel was coming into being in May 1948, Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary that the new state, like the US, had no recognized borders. He was implying that it could still grow, just as the US extended west through the nineteenth century under the doctrine of manifest destiny. It is one reason that the claim by Israel apologists that Israel recognized the 1947 UN General Assembly partition plan whereas the Arabs did not falls flat. The Israelis did not really recognize it. They took lots of territory that the UNGA did not award them, and in later years they tried to annex Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, one tenth of Lebanon, and both the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza. They only managed to keep the latter two, but they were clearly attempting to grab as much of their neighbors’ territory as they could get away with. (The UNGA plan, by the way, did not have the force of law, since it was never ratified by the UN Security Council).

That is, Pardo seems to think he is asking for a return to pre-1967 normalcy, but what he is really asking for is for Israel to settle down and become an ordinary country instead of behaving like a messianic cause with an expansionist remit, as it generally has done since its founding.

The macabre incident took place in the middle of last week, when 16 Israeli policemen went to the home of a young Palestinian man in the Shuafat refugee camp on the outskirts of Jerusalem to arrest him. They maintain that he refused to go quietly, and they were constrained to use force against him. His attorney said when he was arraigned on Thursday that every bit of his body was black and blue from the beating the 16 policemen gave him, and that at one point they held him down and branded his cheek with the Star of David, which has been made a symbol for Israel. The police tried to explain this brand away as being from a policeman’s boot.

At Saturday’s demonstration in Tel Aviv, protest leader Shikma Bressler denounced the extremist ideology of “Kahanism,” insisting that it was all along at the core of the ruling right wing Likud Party. “As a result,” she said, “we are witnessing a breaching of all the dams… Jews stamped a Star of David on the face of a Palestinian detainee. Shame.”

As for the plight of Israeli women, it is dire, as can be seen from the country’s rankings. On women’s political power, it has fallen from 61st among 146 countries in the world in 2022 according to the World Economic Forum to 96th this year. Some educational courses are being segregated by gender to accommodate Ultra-Orthodox men, who won’t sit in a room with unrelated women. This accommodation has been permitted by the country’s High Court, whereas in other instances it has ruled in favor of equal rights for women and men. The current extremist government is hoping to increase the power of rabbinical courts, which are all male and rule in accordance with Jewish religious law, the halakha. Divorce is already in the hands of the rabbinical courts, and as a result, only men can initiate a divorce in Israel, not women.

In one incident this week, teen girls were ordered to “cover up” and sit in the back of a municipal bus, because some Ultra-Orthodox men were passengers. The bus driver accused the girls of “feeling comfortable being naked” and said, “You need to understand this, this is the Jewish state.”

Haaretz writes that a mother of one of the girls, Galit Alush Reuven, a member of the women’s protest group Bonot Alternativa, gave a speech at the demonstration, saying, “misogyny, darkness, racism, coercion – everything erupts under the auspices of the coup that gives free rein to dangerous forces.”

Many Israeli women believe that without the check of the country’s Supreme Court, the government will increasingly make women second-class citizens and defer to Ultra-Orthodox politicians.

Meanwhile, Palestinian-Israelis, some 20% of the population of Israel, are planning demonstrations for Monday against the decision of Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich to divert hundreds of millions of dollars in spending from the Palestinian-Israeli towns to which it had been dedicated to illegal Israeli squatter-settlements on the Palestinian West Bank. Palestinian-Israelis had not joined the protest movement in large numbers because they viewed the Israeli High Court as an internal Jewish matter and had sometimes been disappointed in its rulings. But now the extremist government is impelling even this community to protest.

The Knesset passed a law preventing the Supreme Court from striking down laws they find “unreasonable” in light of the country’s basic laws and from nixing governmental appointments on grounds of corruption. This is the culmination of a campaign by Israeli PM Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, and Ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezelal Smotrich to consolidate their far-right wing coalition power in perpetuity, and to pass anti-democratic legislation to ensure that aim. This step would aid Netanyahu’s fight against graft and corruption charges, and upend democratic norms in Israel. It would also open the door legislative annexation of Palestinian territories in violation of international law.

Embed from Getty ImagesIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (C) and Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich (L) attend a weekly cabinet meeting in the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem, on June 18, 2023. Netanyahu vowed on June 18 to advance the government’s controversial judicial reforms, which have seen his premiership marred by mass protest against the proposed overhaul. (Photo by Ohad Zwigenberg / POOL / AFP) (Photo by OHAD ZWIGENBERG/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

If a majority in the US Congress took similar steps in these polarized times a civil war could erupt here that would make January 6 look like a picnic. The battle for democracy in Israel thus mirrors the parallel struggle in the U.S. The protest dynamic in Israel, on the other hand, bears some similarities to recent US movements, from “Occupy Wall Street” to “Black Lives Matter,” with big crowds in the streets that sometimes block key thoroughfares. I have discussed the vertical alliance between Donald Trump and Israeli PM Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu; and pointed to the political, governmental and historical parallels.

Haaretz columnist Yossi Verter argues that Netanyahu, “ . . . made a blood pact with the racist, messianic, ultra-Orthodox and nationalist State of Judea . . .  He will now be able to marginalize the Supreme Court, depose the attorney general, and appoint a ‘general prosecutor’ to prosecute his cases.” Bibi’s “fan base” is the ultra-Orthodox Haredim and far-right settler communities, and he’s granted their entire wish list of agenda items; including ongoing exemption from military service for the Haredim, and the equivalent of Israeli Proud Boys in key ministerial positions.

The rise and rise of the Zionist far right is connected with major population movements. A mutant brand of zealous religious Zionism has supplanted the political Zionism that was established in Basel in 1896, after the organic Jewish settler movement began in 1882.  The “Revisionist” (fascist-leaning) Zionism of Vladimir “Ze’ev” Jabotinsky, who founded the Jewish Self-Defense Organization in Odessa and then helmed far right wing organizations in British Palestine, ultimately gave rise to the Likud Party, which first came to power under Menachem Begin, a Jabotinsky protégé, in 1977.  The Likud won in part because it attracted the support of many Mizrahi, Middle Eastern Jews, who felt disadvantaged by the Labor Party establishment dominated by European, Ashkenazi Jews. The right-wing zealotry that Begin promoted was wrought up with the ambition to gobble up the remaining Palestinian territories under a regime of settler colonialism. Even leftist and centrist Israelis often supported the settlement movement in the West Bank, which Israel seized in 1967. Those hundreds of thousands of settlers, many of them ultra-Orthodox or Mizrahim and on the far right politically, are championed by several of Netanyahu’s coalition partners and are in a position to dictate policy to the centrists. So first, the relatively secular far right Likud supplanted Labor, and then Likud itself increasingly allied with the religious, messianic Zionists, bringing them to power.

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC-aka “The Joint”) was founded in 1914 to aid Jewish victims of World War I, and Jews settling in Palestine. This refugee relief organization has been branded as a “radical leftist organization” by Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, as he moved to defund its programs. He canceled a 3 million shekel ($817,000) allocation to fight crime in seven troubled Israeli Arab towns, because the program is run by the AJDC.

The Hon. Daniel Cormer, former Israeli Ambassador to India to called this, “a scandalous, anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish move,” while opposition lawmaker Meirav Cohen tweeted, “Boycott the Joint? Seriously? Who’s next? The Jewish National Fund?”  This right-wing mindset is tragically represented by Ben-Gvir, “whose worldview doesn’t extend beyond the settlement of Kiryat Arba,” as characterized by Haaretz columnist Yossi Melman.

Embed from Getty Images
The Israeli far-right Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, appeared at both the Gay Parade and the far-right demonstration in Jerusalem on June 1, 2023. (Photo by Stefano Lorusso/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Israel now faces a constitutional crisis, in which the Supreme Court could strike down the legislation designed to curb its powers. The government may in turn refuse accept the new decision and seek to retaliate. This active political volcano is a result of four years and five inconclusive elections in Bibi’s pursuit of these goals. It has become the battle for Israel’s parliamentary and perhaps, spiritual soul. The conflicts pitch existential questions for Jews such as, “What is Zionism, and what has it become?” How did a political movement designed to protect Jews from persecution morph into a monstrous force of persecution of its own?

Thousands of protesters have been met with violence by the police and government supporters in throughout Israel. Bibi is trying to turn Israel into his own singular dictatorship. After the beatings by police and organized right wing thugs at the demos, Bibi called it a “necessary democratic step aimed at restoring the balance between the branches.” Bibi’s buzz phrases such as “balance” and “safeguarding rather than endangering democracy” turn the obvious meanings of “balance” and “democracy,” pointing to just how Orwellian his far right and corrupt agenda has become.

Israel could well be heading toward its own January 6. The parallels are real. Both the Republican Party and Likud have empowered and invested in their countries’ most extreme far right-wing ideologues, and seized upon opportunities and vulnerabilities to dismantle democratic guard rails that disrupt their agenda. While the U.S. has empowered Congressional Reps such as Marjorie Taylor Green, Tommy Turberville, and Lauren Boebert; Israel has elevated Bibi’s extremist henchmen Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich to czar-like positions on the Cabinet, where they can pursue their worst draconian fantasies against both Palestinians and Israeli leftists and centrists, whom they dismiss as traitors and terrorists. 

Last Thursday, Israelis demonstrated in front of the US Embassy in Israel, demanding that the United States pressure Netanyahu to back off his plan to gut the country’s supreme court. They said they feared the change would harm US-Israeli relations.

On Saturday, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Democratic Progressive Caucus, denounced Israel as a racist state. She clarified on Sunday that she only meant that the current Netanyahu government is racist, not that the idea of Israel is. I don’t think that remark will mollify the Israel lobbies, but the episode shows how alienated some corners of the American political scene have become from the horror show in Tel Aviv.

On Saturday, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in Tel Aviv and other cities for the 28th week in a row to demonstrate against Prime Minister Netanyahu’s planned legislation to gut the powers of the country’s Supreme Court. They also announced that they would devote the coming week to disruptions, including of the rails.

These massive protests, in which fully a fourth of the country has taken part personally, and which are supported by a majority, have demonstrated the polarization of the country.

On Sunday, Netanyahu was constrained to expel from his far right Likud Party the activist Itzik Zarqa. Zarqa had gotten into an argument with protesters, who are generally coded as Ashkenazi or European Jews, while the current coalition draws a great deal of support from the Jews of the Middle East, called Mizrahim.

Zarqa was caught on video shouting, “It’s not for nothing that six million were killed. I’m proud that six million of you were burned!”

He quickly backtracked, but that moment of intense political hatred that turned into an ethnic slur and a glorification of the horrific Nazi genocide of six million European Jews crystallized the rhetorical civil war that has gripped Israel.

Netanyahu has pledged to hold a vote on Tuesday on an article in the bill that takes away from the Supreme Court its power of judicial review of acts of parliament on grounds that the latter are “unreasonable.” The Court can overrule laws it finds contradict the basic principles of reasonableness set out in Israel’s organic law, which jurists have maintained have the force of a constitution.

If the article passes, as it likely will, the Supreme Court will no longer be able to overrule acts of parliament on these grounds, setting the stage for a tyranny of the parliamentary majority. The court would also not be any longer able to strike down appointments of politicians to high office on the grounds that they have shown a pattern of corruption. Women, gays, Muslims, Christians and other groups fear that the Jewish fundamentalists in the cabinet will then pass laws depriving them of their rights, and that the Supreme Court will not be able to counteract such measures. Others fear that Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption, will use the provision to ensure he cannot be found guilty and go to jail.

Historian Yuval Noah Harari points out that Israel has only a unicameral legislature from which the prime minister is elected, and therefore has no other checks and balances on government power save for the Supreme Court. Remove the latter, he says, and you have a dictatorship.

The popularity of the leading parties in the current government has plummeted according to opinion polls. The polling suggests that if elections were held today, the opposition would get well over the 61 seats needed to form a government in the 120-member Knesset.

Ironically, the public changed its mind too slowly. Netanyahu’s current majority is firmly ensconced, and despite the enormous weekly demonstrations, the parliament can certainly pass the bill gutting the judiciary if it so desires. It almost certainly will.

The extremist, fascist parties in Netanyahu’s cabinet intend to use the gutting of the Supreme Court as a way to accelerate illegal squatter-settlements on Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, and to ensure that there can be no judicial backlash against their plans to colonize Palestinian land intensively with Israeli migrants into the territory, and then to annex it, while keeping the Palestinians stateless and without rights.

Thousands of people recently took to the streets of the Old City in Jerusalem for the annual far-right Flag March.

Every year, on Jerusalem Day, marchers descend on Jerusalem with Israeli flags in hand and terrorize the city’s non-Jewish population. As they make their way to the Western Wall at the heart of the Old City, they chant racist slogans, vandalize storefronts and homes and beat up anyone in their path.

As with previous flag marches, counter-protests also took place. But this year, Israeli pro-democracy organisation Tikva called on its supporters to participate in a counter-march in an unusual way. The group tweeted: “After we took back the flag and the Declaration of Independence, it’s time we take back Jerusalem Day as well!” The statement was accompanied by an Israeli flag emoji.

The tweet referred to the rapid transformation the Israeli flag has undergone recently. The flag has long been associated with the political right. As evidenced by the Flag March, the right often uses national symbols centred around the flag.

But in just a few short weeks of protest, Israeli pro-democracy activists managed to make the flag switch sides. What was previously staunchly seen as the property of the right is now a contested political battleground.

Claiming the flag

Since late 2022, Israel has been swept by an intense wave of protests against the government’s proposed judicial reforms. Critics say the reforms are anti-democratic and will undermine the county’s judiciary and weaken the separation of powers.

The government’s efforts to enact the reforms have been met by massive demonstrations across the country.

The most striking visual element of the protests is the overwhelming presence of Israel’s national flag, practically drowning out all other symbols.

Given that anti-government protesters are generally associated with Israel’s centre-left, this is quite unusual. Israeli left-of-centre politics has tended to downplay national symbols, and particularly the flag, in recent decades for various reasons, leaving the right to lay claim to them mostly uncontested.

Yet the national flag is now taking centre stage at anti-government protests. This shift has dramatically changed attitudes towards the flag across the Israeli political spectrum. Protesters report they no longer feel alienated by the flag and fly it proudly, while right-wing figures are calling on their supporters to not give up on the flag.

The association between the flag and anti-reform dissent had grown so strong that police refused to grant a licence to protesters on Independence Day unless they promised not to fly the flag.

Flags as protest symbols

Throughout Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s many years in power, opposition groups have used different symbols to mobilize popular dissent, with varying degrees of success. The 2020-2021 protests that briefly ousted Netanyahu used the Black Flag as its primary symbol, imagery taken from a well-known Israeli proverb.

Using the national flag this time around didn’t happen by chance. Movement leaders organized to make Israeli flags available to demonstrators at major protest sites.

Shikma Schwartzman-Bressler, one of the protest movement’s leaders, told Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

“Our activity is having an effect. We have already reclaimed the national flag, the national anthem, the Declaration of Independence – symbols that until not long ago were [seen as] assets of the nondemocratic camp. Today it is clear to the public that the flag is us and democracy is us.”

Symbols are able to convey complex cultural meanings quickly, and activists use them to capture fleeting public and media attention and as powerful aids for mobilization.

It’s no surprise that when we think of social movements, often the first thing that comes to mind are the symbols most strongly associated with them.

Think of the rainbow flag, for instance, originally designed as a protest symbol in the 1970s and now often the first thing that comes to mind when we think of the LGBTQ2S+ community. These symbols are imbued with meaning by social movements during times of protest and continue to resonate long after the protest has subsided.

By reclaiming the Israeli flag, protesters are denying their opponents one of their most powerful symbols. But more importantly, flying the flag allows activists to frame their protest as a popular uprising and deny the right the opportunity to label any type of dissent as anti-patriotic and treasonous. Pictures of the protests frequently show a sea of Israeli flags stretching out as far as the eye can see in every direction. How can this kind of protest be unpatriotic?

Centering the Israeli flag has benefited the protest in some ways, but it has also alienated Israel’s Palestinian population. As the Israeli flag’s prominence grew, Arab and Jewish anti-occupation activists found that tolerance towards the Palestinian flag diminished, prompting some to ask whether Palestinians are even welcome and what kind of democracy protesters are advocating for.

Israel is experiencing an open public debate over who gets to claim national symbols, which national symbols are represented, who gets to speak for the Israeli public and who is included in that public.

This debate might ring a bell for Canadians as they recall the Freedom Convoy protests. Truckers and their supporters adopted the Canadian flag as a symbol of their movement which served as a major element in their messaging.

For many Canadians, seeing the flag used that way — particularly, seeing it flying next to hate symbols like swastikas and Confederate flags — sparked uneasiness with the flag and what it represents. That led to a debate about what the flag represents, what it should represent and the history of the flag.

Protests are social arenas in which meanings are made and fought over. The Israeli and Canadian cases demonstrate how battles over meaning aren’t limited to new or obscure symbols. Israeli activists’ swift rewriting of the political meaning surrounding their national flag, and Canadian trucker’s co-opting the Canadian flag, show how even very established symbols can be dramatically reinterpreted.

Tom Einhorn, PhD Candidate, Sociology, University of British Columbia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The site of the French ambassador to the United Nations, Nicolas de Rivière, explains that the European Union chose May 9 to commemorate a major speech of then French Minister of Foreign Affairs Robert Schuman on May 9, 1950, in which he outlined new forms of cooperation in Europe that would achieve long-term peace. His proposal is now considered the “Birth Act” of the European Union. This year the EU is beginning the Year of Skills, encouraging Europeans to seek lifelong education.

Schuman suggested that France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg create a common market for their coal and steel resources by abolishing tariffs. He made this suggestion in concert with Jean Monnet and while he had established a channel to Konrad Adenauer, working for reconciliation.

In contrast, Ben-Gvir is a notorious racist, having been charged 50 times with incitement to racial violence. He wants to deport from Israel all those Israelis of Palestinian heritage who disagree with his policies– and even such Israeli Jews. “It is time for us to be landlords,” he says. He has defended a group that wants to ban intermarriage as “miscegenation” and that considers churches to be centers of idolatry that should be closed down. He has more than once pulled a gun on Palestinians. He told Palestinian security guards at a parking lot who asked him to move, “I’ll take care of you!” as he pulled his weapon.

He recently said he wanted the Palestinian hamlet of Huwara “shuttered and burned down.”

Like all extremists, Ben-Gvir got on his high horse about this snub, demanding the freedom of speech that he routinely attempts to deny to others, and confusing incitement to violence with free speech. Ben-Gvir tried to take control of Tel Aviv police to force them to take harsher measures against Israeli protesters against the government.

Let us turn to Europe Day’s honoree. From his European Union page and the Schuman project we can gather this about Schuman: He was born in Luxembourg, and lived in Alsace-Lorraine and so came under the influence both of France and Germany. After France regained Alsace-Lorraine he ran for the French parliament from there and was elected. He had devoted himself after his mother’s death to peacemaking, and hoped that the Vichy could find a way to restore peace. But he came to understand that the Nazis could not be reasoned with.

He refused General Petain’s offer of a job under Nazi occupation in France and so was arrested and transported to prison in Germany in 1940. The Nazis tried very hard to recruit him to write for them, threatening him with consignment to a death camp at Auschwitz if he did not comply, but he refused. In 1942, he managed to escape. He went to France.

As long as Vichy was not under direct rule from Berlin, he was able to move about and address audiences, assuring them that Germany had already lost the war and it was only a matter of time until it was defeated. The Nazis put a $100,000 bounty on his head. He was one of the first sources to report, with horror, on the mass killings of Jews in Ukraine, which he probably heard about in prison or from the German officials who tried to recruit him. He also, however, had gained a good idea of the massive losses taken by the German people and military, which was the origin of his conviction that Berlin had already lost.

He had to go into hiding when Germany asserted direct rule, and was in touch with the French Resistance. General De Gaulle attempted to persuade him to come to London, but he preferred to operate covertly in France.

After the war he reentered parliament and then became the French foreign minister. In a major speech at the Court of St. James on May 5, 1949, Schuman said that a new supranational Europe would emerge without anyone giving up their national identity and traditions. It would be sited in France, of which he said

“Our revolutionaries once carried beyond our frontiers the new message of liberty – today this has became the legacy of all mankind. In their zeal they did not always know how to keep themselves within the limit of peaceful methods. We will not suffer the same temptation. Example and persuasion will be the only means available in this enterprise; it will be exclusively peaceful and constructive. We will threaten nobody.”

He warned against selfish nationalism: “We know only too well where the ‘splendid’ and selfish isolation of states can lead us. States, like individuals, were created to get to understand each other and to help each other out.”

Schuman stood against racial animosity, and it was his ability to reach out to Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s first post-war Chancellor, that helped lay the foundations for the European Union.

This is the man and the vision that May 9 honors in Europe.

Schuman and Ben-Gvir could not be more different. The EU was correct to cancel the diplomatic reception once Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had the temerity to send the infamous proponent of “Jewish Power” to represent Israel there. The episode shows the ways in which the current government, the most extreme and fascistic in Israeli history, is raising questions about the place of Israel in polite society. Its Apartheid practices should already have done that, but ex-colonial powers in Europe touchy about their own sordid past seem to have difficulty denouncing them. Open Jewish supremacy is another matter.

The Jordanian parliament condemned the Israeli storming of al-Aqsa as an act of “state terrorism.”

Both inside Israel and in the Palestinian West Bank, Palestinians held rallies and marches to protest the attacks.

Israeli officials falsely characterize these retreats at al-Aqsa as the faithful “barricading” themselves in the mosque, which makes an act of humble piety sound like a military maneuver. As usual, they accuse Palestinians of being terrorists, having weapons, etc. There is no evidence for this propaganda, and lots of evidence against it. When the Israeli troops made their incursion, all the helpless Palestinians could do was set off some fireworks to try to stop it.

The reason the Israelis don’t want Palestinian worshipers to carry out overnight retreats at al-Aqsa is that they want to let militant Israeli cultists into the Muslim complex at dawn every day for the next week. So they are expelling Muslims from a mosque for the sake of far right, extremist Jews who are horning in on this Muslim holy site.

All of this is shameful in international law, but it is also very, very dangerous. In fact, the Israeli encroachments on the sacred al-Aqsa mosque are some of the more dangerous actions now being taken in the world.

On February 22, 2006, al-Qaeda or some similar group blew up the golden-domed Askariyya Shrine in Samarra, Iraq. The shrine is sacred to followers of the Shiite branch of Islam, since it is associated with the Twelfth Imam and his father, Hasan al-Askari. For Shiites the Twelfth Islam is a bit like Jesus for Christians, a holy figure who was transported into another, spiritual dimension from which he will one day return to institute apocalyptic changes on earth before the Judgment Day. The explosion that brought down the golden dome of the shrine killed no one. But it set off an orgy of Sunni-Shiite violence that kicked off a civil war in Iraq through 2006-2007. Some months as many as 3,000 people were killed.

Peter Galbraith, a former US ambassador to Croatia who was advising the Iraqi Kurds in that era, observed that it was the most deadly act of terrorism in history that killed no one. All the deaths ensued afterwards because of this assault on a spiritually meaningful, iconic building and the way it fed into sectarian feelings. I fear most US personnel in Iraq at the time did not know the significance of the Askariyyah Shrine, which they tended to call a “mosque.” A mosque is a place of worship analogous to a church or synagogue; a shrine is a holy place, often dominated by the tomb of a saint, that one visits for blessings.

There are a handful of really important shrines in the world. There is the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome. There is the church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. There is the Maha Bodhi Buddhist Temple at Bodh Gaya, Bihar, India. Also, say, the Sensoji Temple in Asakusa in Tokyo. For Hinduism, you have, e.g., the Vishwanath Temple at Varanasi (Benares) in India.

The three most important shrines in Islam are the Kaaba in Mecca, the Prophet Muhammad’s tomb in Medina, and the al-Aqsa Mosque Complex atop what Jews call the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

Photo of al-Aqsa Mosque by philippe collard on Unsplash

The al-Aqsa Mosque complex is in big trouble, and that makes 1.8 billion Muslims deeply unhappy, even angry.

Muslims believe that the Prophet Muhammad ascended to the edges of paradise from that spot (in 617 CE?).

Muslim armies negotiated the surrender of Jerusalem in 636 or 637. At that time, the Temple Mount had been abandoned for hundreds of years, under Roman rule, and Jews had by law been banned from Jerusalem. It was the Muslims who gradually let the Jews back into the city after half a millennium. In 705 the Muslim empire erected the al-Aqsa Mosque, as Islam had begun to emerge as a religion in its own right. Because of its association in people’s minds with the ascension of the Prophet, it was considered a holy site. Muslims often stopped off there to worship on their way to Mecca on pilgrimage, all through the succeeding centuries. Except for a brief period during the medieval crusades, Muslim states ruled Jerusalem until World War I, when the British defeated the Ottoman Empire and established the Mandate of Palestine, which in 1939 London promised would become the independent state of Palestine for Palestinians by 1949.

Instead, the 600,000 Jews the British admitted to their Mandate or colony of Palestine, against the wishes of its 1.4 million Palestinian inhabitants, engaged in a struggle both against the departing British and against neighboring Arab states such as Jordan and Egypt to establish a Jewish state, in which they succeeded in May 1948. Some 740,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed and forever exiled from their homes and farms in what became Israel. Some live in refugee camps to this day.

In 1967 Israel seized East Jerusalem, with its solidly Palestinian population, and so put the al-Aqsa Mosque under Israeli military occupation. It is occupied the way the 400,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem and environs are occupied.

Far right wing and millenarian Jewish movements would very much like to tear down the al-Aqsa Mosque and build the Third Temple on the Temple Mount. There is, by the way, no archeological evidence that the place so called was the site of Solomon’s temple. It is just a folk belief. There are many disputes about where exactly the Second Temple stood, but Israeli archeologists have concluded that the al-Aqsa Mosque does not stand within the area of the ancient Temple.

Nevertheless, far right wing Jews of the sort now being coddled and enabled by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu have a plan for the al-Aqsa Mosque complex. They would like to take over part of it for regular Jewish worship. But that would mean frequently barring Muslims from worshiping at al-Aqsa, for Jewish “security.” Of course, as noted above, some would like to demolish the al-Aqsa entirely.

The thing that stands in the way of these plans is that the holy places in Jerusalem are governed by a kind of compact among religious groups called the “Status Quo,” which Israel had agreed to observe.

The UN reported last year,

“The Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine said that a few days ago, Israeli occupying forces stormed the Aqsa Mosque compound/Haram al-Sharif, shooting at worshipers and desecrating the mosque with military boots and violence. He pointed out that 200 Palestinians, including women and children were wounded and 400 arrested, yet Israel claims it is upholding the historic status quo.

Not only does Israel use security to justify killing Palestinian children on their way to school, it labels Palestinian worshippers as terrorists, he continued. Jewish extremists and settlers are not merely visiting Haram al‑Sharif, but are seeking a takeover. Israel has no authority over Haram al‑Sharif where the historic and legal status quo must be upheld, he said, adding that the occupying Power is also targeting the Palestinian identity of the city.”

By the way, the extremists have also been attacking Christian churches and sites and would clearly like to drive the other religions out of Jerusalem. Their supporters are now in the Israeli cabinet.

Israel’s new goverment is the most right-wing and religious leadership the country has had in the 75 years of its existence, as many observers have pointed out. And this style of leadership may last because it represents the next generation of Israelis.

You don’t have to look far to see that the religiously observant Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox sectors of Israel’s population are growing quickly. The new minister of Jerusalem affairs has 12 children. The minister of national missions – one of the few women in the cabinet – has 11, the housing minister 10, the interior minister nine, the finance minister and the minister of immigration have seven each and the minister of heritage has six.

The rapid growth of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox population has profound consequences for the rest of society, especially Israel’s delicate status quo between religion and secularism. Moreover, ultra-Orthodox voters and politicians are increasingly allied with parties from another religious demographic whose influence is growing: Orthodox nationalists.

Ultra-Orthodox in Jerusalem. File. Pixabay.

As a professor of Israel Studies, I would argue that Israel’s future may look less like the cosmopolitan, secular Tel Aviv than the nearby ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak or one of the satellite towns outside Jerusalem that are centers of Orthodox nationalism.

Four tribes

In 2015, then-President Reuven Rivlin gave a famous speech in which he called Israel a society of “four tribes.”

There are secular or moderately religious Jews, who constituted the vast majority of the country’s founders and until today make up most of its political, economic and cultural elite. Though estimates vary, around half of Israel’s Jewish population consider themselves secular, and 19% are marginally observant.

Then there is the group usually called National Religious, or Religious Zionist. These Israelis combine Orthodox Judaism with commitment to political Zionism, and now constitute the core of the settler movement in the West Bank. They constitute around 20% of Israel’s Jewish population, or about 15% of its total population.

A third group is called Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox in English. Unlike other Orthodox Jews, who are integrated into mainstream neighborhoods and workplaces, many Haredi groups try to separate themselves to an extent from secular society. Originally, they did not support the creation of the State of Israel, which they believed should come about only through the Messiah. Today, however, Haredi communities are politically associated with right-wing parties.

The fourth group Rivlin mentioned are Israeli Arabs, or as they increasingly call themselves, Palestinian citizens of Israel.

These four groups rarely interact in everyday life. Each has its own school system, and they marry and socialize within each other – which Rivlin warned could weaken the country.

Haredim today

Over time, there has been a population shift between the four sectors. When Rivlin delivered his speech in 2015, he reported that for the first time, most of Israel’s first graders were not admitted to secular Jewish schools, but to one of the three other systems.

The ultra-Orthodox population is growing quickly. Haredi families have an average of about seven children, compared with just three in the general population and two among secular Jews. According to a recent study of the Israel Democracy Institute, the ultra-Orthodox sector constitutes 13.5% of Israel’s population today and will rise to 16% by the end of the decade, with further increases expected. They already constitute about a quarter of all Jewish pupils in Israel’s schools today.

These demographic changes pose challenges for Israel’s society and economy. For example, the poverty rate among the ultra-Orthodox is twice as high as among other Israelis due to a culture that emphasizes intensive religious study over paid employment, and schools that prize religious learning over secular subjects. The unemployment rate among Haredi men is almost 47%, compared to less than 5% in the total population.

Unlike most other Jewish Israelis, most Haredi youth do not serve in the army, which is based on exemptions the secular founder of the state, David Ben-Gurion, made 75 years ago. At the time, the ultra-Orthodox were a marginal group, and Ben-Gurion was convinced they would remain so.

Young Arab men and women are not required to serve in the army, either. Added to the number of Haredi youth, this means that almost half of Israel’s eligible population are not drafted today.

National Religious

The second-fastest growing “tribe” in Israel, based on birth rate – with families of four children, on average – are the Orthodox National Religious, whose current political leaders represent the settlers of the West Bank.

Religious voters who support these groups often prioritize Israel’s character as a Jewish state over its character as a liberal democracy. For example, 65% of Jewish Israelis who identify as “religious” and 89% of ultra-Orthodox say that Jewish law should take precedence over democratic principles in the case of a contradiction, according to a Pew survey.

National Religious parties, which have proved popular with young voters, were the real surprise winner of the November 2022 election – particularly their more radicalized leadership. Whereas former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, for example, was ready to enter a coalition with left-wing and Arab partners, new leaders Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir reject any cooperation with parties left of center and would not be welcome by those parties, anyway.

Political consequences

What both religious sectors have in common is a growing outspokenness about making Israeli society more in line with Orthodox principles. For example, Israel is the most LGBTQ-friendly state in the Middle East, yet many government ministers and their spiritual leaders have used derogatory language toward the LGBTQ community. There have been calls to permit separate seating for men and women at public events and to allow doctors to refuse patients whom they do not want to treat on religious grounds.

These shifts have the potential to alienate American Jews who are, apart from Israelis, the largest Jewish community in the world but mainly identify with the more liberal Reform or Conservative movements.

The different types of Orthodox Jews have come a long way from rejecting political Zionism or from keeping religion out of politics. Smotrich, the National Zionist new minister of transportation, has openly stated that his ideal is a Torah state, meaning a Jewish state founded on Jewish religious laws.

His supporters are still far from fulfilling that dream, but well aware that the country’s demographic changes may be on their side – a challenge to Israel’s delicate status quo. Overcoming the gaps in Israel’s increasingly segmented society will require serious bridge-building efforts on both sides – even more than at the time of Rivlin’s warning.

Michael Brenner, Professor of Jewish History and Culture at Ludwig Maximilian University and Abensohn Chair in Israel Studies, American University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.