It was a groundswell. What began in the spring of 1965, when 40 anti-war students burned a draft card at UC Berkeley and was soon followed by two people torching themselves to death, became in the fall of 1969 mass rallies that sent millions to the streets, including 200,000 in San Francisco and 500,000 in Washington, DC.
More than 200,000 Americans had by then been charged with either dodging or sabotaging the draft. By 1970, students had attacked some 200 military recruitment offices on campuses. By the spring of 1972, riots at Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton universities spread countrywide. By 1975, America quit Vietnam.
It was a massive, grassroots movement the likes of which the world had never seen, and the American government’s response was as impulsive and misguided as the war it did not know how to win.
What began with congressional investigations into American POWs’ alleged collaboration with North Vietnam proceeded to police brutality, underscored by the Kent State University shootings in which four students were killed, and a rally in Los Angeles that ended with three killed.
Now, as wartime protests rock Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and as police storm protesters with growing violence, the question arises: Is there any analogy between the American past and the Israeli present? The answer is that in terms of the war at stake, there is no analogy at all – in fact, there is contrast; but in terms of the protests’ energy, dynamic, and steadily approaching bottom line, there sure is.
THE MOST obvious difference between America’s Vietnam-era protests and Israel’s current protests is that our protests are not against the war. Our war is not against a distant nation that did nothing to us, as Americans rightly felt about Vietnam. Our war is with immediate neighbors who attacked us, viciously.
The Israeli protesters’ dilemma is, therefore, not about the protests’ morality but about their effect. Demanding a government’s removal while it is leading a war of defense might damage the war effort itself, fear many who identify with the protests but are reluctant to protest while fighting rages in both the South and the North. That’s a fair concern, but it’s technical. Morally, as Bar-Ilan University philosopher Avi Sagi noted in his essay “Wartime Protest: The Burning Question” (Hartman Institute, 2024, Hebrew), war does not suspend democracy. Moreover, “in time of war, it is the citizens’ duty to stand on guard and verify that the state meets its moral and civic obligations,” wrote Sagi, a co-author of the IDF’s code of ethics.
The drama thus lies not in the dilemma the demonstrators face but in the violence they meet – physically, rhetorically, and politically.
Police violence during protests
Physically, police this week beat, clubbed, tackled, and water-sprayed demonstrators outside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s house in Jerusalem. One demonstrator, Dr. Tal Weissbach, a senior gynecologist at Tel Hashomer Hospital, was severely injured in her left eye, which she might have lost.
The rhetorical response is equally appalling.
Likud lawmaker Nissim Vaturi said the demonstrators are “an arm of Hamas.” The prime minister’s son accused the IDF’s General Staff – the warriors who spend their days and nights braving enemy fire while he sunbathes in Miami – with seeking Israel’s defeat.
Shortly afterward, the prime minister’s mouthpiece, Channel 14 commentator Yaakov Bardugo, accused Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi of seeking Hamas’s survival in power.
Never mind the pattern common to these burps – brazen lies coming from well-placed Likudniks out to shift blame – they represent panic; the same panic with which the Nixon administration responded as the Vietnam protests spun out of its control.
And the panic, then as now, is well justified, a message conveyed this week by Likud lawmakers who, faced with their own coalition’s political violence, finally threw the book at Netanyahu. FACED WITH the coalition’s plot to let Shas create hundreds of jobs for its cronies as city and neighborhood rabbis by transferring their appointments from the municipalities to the government – a scandal any day, but an abomination in a time of war – appalled Likud lawmakers and mayors, who rebelled.
“Don’t be partners to this disgraceful law!” Dimona Mayor Benny Bitton exhorted the lawmakers. “You should all be ashamed of yourselves,” Ashkelon Mayor Tomer Glam admonished the legislators. He asked them how they could dedicate time and money to such a scheme when his war-scarred city, which has lost 30 people in the current war, begs for rehabilitation. “Why?” he asked.
The coalition’s answer to Mayor Glam – “We don’t care about you and your sorry city, we care about Shas” – followed, as Likud replaced the Law Committee members who threatened to derail the legislation.
But the protest movement, like America’s last century, assumed a life of its own. Likud’s two rebellious lawmakers were soon joined by five more, and by the following morning Netanyahu canceled the legislation.
An end of an era?
Netanyahu thinks there was one crack in his dam that he quickly found and patched. He is wrong. What he faces is the beginning of a long-overdue mutiny, fed by the same energy of the protests in the streets: the conviction that this war is tied by the umbilical cord to his corrupt establishment and the era it has produced.
America’s Vietnam trauma had many reasons, but a major cause was a deformed draft system that favored the privileged and abused the rest.
Netanyahu’s draft system is worse, the crux of the horse-thieves’ alliance that is his political skeleton’s spine. This is what Likud’s renegades now understand, what their leader will never concede, and what will ultimately bring him down.
Likud’s renegades now effectively say what the protesters in the streets say: Israel needs a new beginning. And thanks to them, Israel will get its new beginning – the fresh start the Jewish state so obviously needs, its people so loudly demand, and its leaders so rightly dread.
www.MiddleIsrael.netThe writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.
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