![STUDENTS PROTEST outside the Education Ministry in Tel Aviv, Sept. 1, the first day of school. Their banner reads, ‘Without the hostages, there is no learning [school].’](https://images.jpost.com/image/upload/f_auto,fl_lossy/q_auto/c_fill,g_faces:center,h_720,w_1280/679523 "STUDENTS PROTEST outside the Education Ministry in Tel Aviv, Sept. 1, the first day of school. Their banner reads, ‘Without the hostages, there is no learning [school].’")
The school year opened on September 1 in Givatayim with the usual rituals: parents escorting children to first grade, classmates reuniting after summer break, group photos, new backpacks. But this year, the morning also resounded with drums and chants for the hostages still held in Gaza.
“Everyone at once,” a group of high schoolers shouted, calling for a deal to free all 48 hostages as they marched down a Givatayim street, the lead four pounding on drums.
They were not alone. A number of students across the country used the first day of school to demonstrate on behalf of the hostages, only 20 of whom are believed to be alive – one more thread in a protest movement that has swept the nation.
Protesters fill Hostages Square in Tel Aviv every Saturday night, stand with posters at junctions across the country throughout the week, and from time to time – as they did two Sundays ago – declare a strike and block traffic on major highways.
This is a protest movement that receives ample, often sympathetic, coverage on Army Radio, Kan, and Channels 11, 12, and 13 – but more critical treatment on Channel 14 and Galei Yisrael. The movement claims to embody the will of the people, while at the same time railing against the government elected less than three years ago to represent that very will.
The Bring Them Home protests may feel unprecedented in their urgency, but in truth they are only the latest installment in a long Israeli tradition. The street has been an important political arena in this country since the state’s founding, often rivaling the Knesset. From the furious demonstrations over German reparations in the early 1950s to the tent cities of Rothschild Boulevard in 2011, Israelis have repeatedly turned to protest to express outrage, demand accountability, or resist policies they deemed intolerable.
But do these demonstrations actually succeed? The record is mixed. Some helped create an atmosphere that toppled leaders or forced policy changes, others fizzled, while still others achieved outcomes many later came to regret.
The Wadi Salib riots of 1959, for instance, gave voice to Mizrahi grievances but changed little on the ground. The Four Mothers movement of the late 1990s helped push Israel out of Lebanon, but later critics would argue that the hasty withdrawal emboldened Hezbollah. The campaign to free Gilad Schalit succeeded in bringing him home, but it also freed more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, which included the architects of Oct. 7.
Diverse agendas or a collective narrative?
Prof. Eitan Alimi of Hebrew University, a sociologist specializing in the study of social movements and political protests, questions whether one can call everything happening on the street today one movement. Rather, he describes it as a convergence of different movements with diverse agendas.
“The movements we see are working together at the same time and in the same spaces. They are coming from distinct places. There are activists who are coming from the [anti-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] protests and movements of 2018–2019 – the Black Flags, Balfour, and Crime Minister protests. And there are others who are coming from movements before then, such as the social justice protests,” he stated.
Alimi said that there is a convergence of all the different strands of protest movements over the last 10 to15 years, and each wants to push forward or highlight a different agenda. Some focused on fighting the judicial overhaul, others on government corruption. The magnet now bringing them all together – which they all believe in – is the hostage issue.
Prof. Eyal Lewin, a political scientist specializing in political psychology at Ariel University, where he studies national resilience and collective narratives, views it differently. For him, this is not various streams flowing into one river but the same roaring river: anti-government protests.
“I am not looking at this as something isolated but as something going back to January 2023,” he said, referring to the massive demonstrations against the government’s judicial overhaul plan. “What we are seeing is the same – it really didn’t stop.” He said the current protests are a continuation of the judicial reform anti-government ones, just under a different banner: “Bring Them Home.”
Alimi sees convergence, Lewin continuity. Both views raise a larger question: How do today’s demonstrations compare with the many protest waves that have defined Israel’s history? How are they similar, and in what ways are they different?
A history of protests
One of the earliest and fiercest waves of mass protest in Israel came in 1952, just four years after the establishment of the state, when David Ben-Gurion’s government agreed to accept German reparations for Holocaust survivors. For many Israelis, the idea of taking money from Germany so soon after the gas chambers was abhorrent, an unforgivable desecration of memory.
Demonstrations led by Herut Party founder Menachem Begin erupted across the country. Thousands clashed with police outside the Knesset, pelting the building with stones. The violence shocked the fledgling state and revealed how raw the Holocaust memory still was. Yet Ben-Gurion pressed on and pushed the agreement through anyway, arguing that the money was essential for the young country’s survival and the absorption of hundreds of thousands of immigrants.
The demonstrations failed to block the reparations agreement. But they did set an early precedent: When Israelis felt their leaders had crossed a moral line, they would take to the streets. In terms of policy, however, these protests failed. Like later ones, they demonstrated the limits of street power against a determined government.
A few years later, in 1959, it was not memory but inequality that drove another wave of protests. In Haifa’s Wadi Salib neighborhood, police shot and wounded a Moroccan immigrant, and years of Mizrahi frustration boiled over into riots. The government set up a commission of inquiry, but little changed in the short term. What Wadi Salib did do, however, was plant a political seed: Mizrahi disaffection that would smolder for nearly two decades before helping propel Begin and the Likud to power in 1977.
That frustration resurfaced again in the early 1970s in Jerusalem, this time in a more organized form. A group of Mizrahi youths calling themselves the Black Panthers, inspired by a movement of the same name in America, staged sit-ins, led marches, and held noisy demonstrations demanding equality in jobs, housing, and education.
Their marches were brash, their rhetoric angry, and they directly confronted then-prime minister Golda Meir, who dismissed them as “not nice people.” Though loud, the Black Panthers did not trigger significant change. They shifted the conversation but not the country’s reality.
If the early demonstrations centered on social inequality, the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War shifted the axis of protest to accountability in the face of a security breakdown – something that, in light of Oct. 7, sounds eerily familiar.
The shock of the 1973 war shattered the public’s trust in its leaders. Demonstrators gathered outside the Prime Minister’s Office and demanded resignations. This protest movement was not about marginalized communities. Instead, for the first time, it represented mainstream Israelis furious that their government had failed miserably in its most basic duty: the country’s defense. The echoes of those protests resonate today.
The Agranat Commission, established to investigate those failures, ultimately recommended the dismissal of senior military leaders. Public anger, however, went further, calling for Golda Meir to go. She eventually resigned in 1974, a rare instance when street pressure seemed to play a role in bringing down a government.
Yet even here, historians debate the causality. As Ariel University’s Lewin noted, “There is a myth that the protests after Yom Kippur led Golda and Moshe Dayan to resign. [But] what caused Golda to resign was pressure from inside the party.” He said that if Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres had not pushed from inside the party, neither one would have resigned. In other words, even when a protest appears impactful, it is politics behind the scenes that is more decisive.
Out of that same period of disillusionment, a very different kind of protest movement emerged: Gush Emunim. While Wadi Salib and the Panthers represented marginalized communities demanding equality, Gush Emunim was Religious Zionists seeking settlement in Judea and Samaria. Their protests were not against neglect but for ideology, pressing governments to allow outposts and normalize Jewish presence beyond the Green Line. They succeeded in setting an agenda and putting settlements at the heart of Israeli politics.
Still, they also encountered the same limits as others: They could not prevent Begin from returning Sinai to Egypt in 1982, nor could they stop Ariel Sharon from withdrawing from Gaza in 2005.
If Gush Emunim represented the Right, the Left’s answer after the Yom Kippur War was Peace Now. Formed in 1978 under a “land for peace” banner, its defining moment came after the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982. It organized a massive protest that drew hundreds of thousands of people to Tel Aviv, demanding accountability.
This demonstration helped lead to the establishment of the Kahan Commission of Inquiry, which implicated then-defense minister Sharon and led to his resignation – a seeming victory of protest. Peace Now pushed further for an IDF withdrawal from Lebanon, but that did not occur until 2000 and was heavily influenced by another protest movement, the Four Mothers campaign.
That movement was established directly after 73 soldiers were killed in a helicopter crash while ferrying them to Lebanon in 1997. The Four Mothers’ call was simple and emotional: Bring our children home. Their protests were modest in size compared to Peace Now, but they were morally potent: mothers standing with photos of their sons, asking why their children were dying in Lebanon with no clear purpose.
Within three years, then-prime minister Ehud Barak did precisely what they demanded, ordering a unilateral withdrawal. The movement helped create the public atmosphere that made such a move possible. Mothers celebrated, but Hezbollah and Israel’s enemies drew a different lesson and became emboldened: Israel could be forced out. Once again, a protest that seemed like a victory was later deemed by many as a costly strategic mistake.
While these ideological and security-driven movements grabbed headlines, the haredim (ultra-Orthodox) waged their own parallel protests over the years – less dramatic perhaps, but often more effective. They mobilized against archaeological digs near ancient graves, blocked roads on Shabbat, and staged massive rallies to preserve yeshiva exemptions from the draft. They weren’t protesting for change but rather against it in favor of the status quo.
Some of these protests failed: Cinemas and places of entertainment are open on Shabbat, and cars do travel on Shabbat on Jerusalem’s Ramot Road. But on what is currently the most charged issue, conscription, they prevailed: Haredim are still, for the most part, not going to the army. Overall, what these demonstrations illustrate is that narrow, defensive goals pursued with single-mindedness and discipline often fared better than grand ideological causes.
In the 1990s, protests returned to the heart of Israeli politics with fury. The Oslo process sparked massive right-wing rallies. The accords proceeded, with Rabin famously saying that Golan Heights residents protesting against any deal with Syria that would cede the region could “spin like propellers,” for all he cared. These demonstrations did not overturn the Oslo process but did erode its legitimacy.
A decade later, the shoe was on the other foot. In 2005, Sharon’s disengagement plan prompted one of the largest protest mobilizations in Israeli history. Tens of thousands of orange-clad demonstrators clogged highways and junctions, chanting, marching, and praying. Despite their passion, they failed.
Settlers were removed, Gaza was evacuated, and the orange ribbons disappeared. Like the anti-Oslo protests before them, the anti-disengagement rallies revealed both the power and the limits of protest: They mobilized extraordinary numbers, but they could not deter a determined prime minister.
The following years brought a different kind of protest: personal, familial, and relentless. For five years, the parents of Gilad Schalit camped outside the Prime Minister’s Residence, marched across the country, and rallied thousands behind their son’s cause. In 2011, they succeeded – Schalit was freed in exchange for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. The country celebrated, but Hamas drew its own conclusion: Hostage-taking worked. As with the Four Mothers, the movement “succeeded” but at a price Israel continues to pay.
That same summer, Israel witnessed the largest social protest in its history. A young woman pitching a tent on Rothschild Boulevard to protest the cost of housing sparked a wave that brought hundreds of thousands into the streets.
The “cottage cheese” protests demanded “social justice.” Even as they dominated headlines for months, their overall impact was minimal. Granted, committees were formed and reports were written, but little changed. Just like the Black Panthers four decades earlier, this protest movement shifted the conversation but did not manage to alter the reality. The one thing it did do was put economic issues on the agenda in the next election, fueling the way for Yair Lapid’s successful entrance into politics in 2013.
By the late 2010s, protests were again personal – and political. The “Crime Minister” demonstrations outside Netanyahu’s residence, fueled by his corruption indictments, filled the streets weekly for two years. They weakened him, contributed to the brief Bennett–Lapid government, but did not end his career. Netanyahu returned. The lesson was clear: Protests could damage but not necessarily dethrone.
The judicial overhaul protests of 2023 took things even further. Hundreds of thousands poured into the streets week after week, reservists threatened not to serve, and the economy wobbled. Netanyahu was forced to pause parts of his plan, a rare instance when the street clearly constrained government policy. However, the fight over Israel’s judiciary remained unresolved, and the country became more polarized than ever – inviting the Oct. 7 attacks.
Mixed results don't deter protesters
A look at these protests shows checkered results. But that raises a fascinating question: If success is rare, why do Israelis keep protesting?
“Good question,” said Alimi. “Because you have to feel that you are doing something, that you cannot not do anything. In many respects, this is what you are seeing: People realize that the effectiveness is limited, but they cannot stay home.”
Lewin sees the penchant to demonstrate as an Israeli habit, as ingrained as another one that became apparent on Oct. 7: setting aside all the protests and arguments and rallying together “to save one another.”
“We are a very involved nation,” Alimi said, explaining why Israel seems to take to the streets more than other nations. “We are wrestling with our identity; it is part of caring – for better and for worse.”
So where do the current protests fit? They are at once familiar and unique. Like the Four Mothers movement, they are driven by anguished families. Like the Schalit campaign, they focus on hostages. Like the Balfour and the judicial protests, they mobilize week after week, waving flags and setting up roadblocks.
But they are different, too. These protests reflect new national fault lines: not Right and Left in terms of diplomatic efforts and territorial concessions but between those who love Netanyahu and those who loathe him. Their demand is immediate, not long term. And the ambiguity of their goals is stark: Everyone wants the hostages home, but not everyone agrees at what price.
Protests have long been a defining feature of Israel’s democracy – they give voice to anguish, mobilize citizens, and hold leaders to account. But they are not inherently virtuous. Sometimes they prevent mistakes; other times, they create them. Sometimes they succeed; other times, they fail spectacularly.
The current hostage protests embody this tension. They are raw, emotional, and urgent. They command empathy. But they also raise difficult questions: What if “success” today creates new dangers tomorrow? What if political pressure for a hostage deal encourages the enemy? What if protests undermine broader security objectives?
Israeli history teaches one lesson: Protests matter. They shape leaders’ decisions, alter public discourse, and leave legacies long after the chants die down and the placards are discarded. Sometimes they serve as the conscience of the nation – but not always. Sometimes they prove to be its Achilles’ heel.