Generals, Peaceniks, and Palestinian Fighters Agree: Bibi Must Be Stopped
Jesse Rosenfeld
Sat, July 22, 2023
LONG READ
On a narrow hillside road crowded with stucco apartment buildings in the Jenin refugee camp, 22-year-old “Abu Nidal” sits in an open storefront decorated with posters of fallen fighters, clutching his M16. Voices and static blare from the radio stuck to his green tactical vest. Flanked by young men just like him, he is the face of a new Palestinian armed rebellion.
The will to fight and die against unending Israeli military rule has been spreading through refugee camps and working-class neighborhoods in the occupied West Bank for almost a year. Violence escalated this summer as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plunged deeper into multiple political crises. Israeli settlers have rampaged in Palestinian villages, while Israel has expanded settlements and carried out large-scale ground and air assaults on Jenin’s refugee camp. Claiming it was necessary to rout out fighters who have launched attacks on Israelis and to destroy explosive-making sites, the Israeli military has forced thousands of civilians to flee. Israeli drone strikes killed Palestinian fighters from the sky as soldiers invaded people’s homes and bulldozers ripped up the camp’s winding streets — smashing its water and electricity infrastructures. Israeli Apache helicopters have launched missile attacks in the West Bank for the first time in nearly 20 years, while armored convoys rolling through Jenin are met with assault-rifle ambushes and have been hit by IEDs from the likes of Abu Nidal and his men.
“Abu Nidal” inside the Jenin refugee camp
Throughout his career, Netanyahu has used military escalation and settlement expansion to rally public support. However, fighters like Abu Nidal say that the roots of their rebellion are in the rage of a generation being forced to grow up in the shadow of Israel’s walls and segregated by its checkpoints without hope of things changing.
Before taking up arms, Abu Nidal studied to become an engineer but saw no escape from the harsh conditions in an overcrowded camp built as temporary relief for his great-grandparents’ generation in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Occupied by Israel since the 1967 war, Jenin has been a hub of Palestinian armed resistance for more than 20 years, and its fighters have carried out attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians across Israel and the West Bank. Its refugee camp was razed to the ground by the Israeli army in 2002 at the height of the Second Intifada, only to be rebuilt and raided regularly ever since.
Abu Nidal insists on the nom de guerre for security precautions. Yet, despite drones buzzing overhead, neither Abu Nidal (Arabic for “Father of the Struggle”) nor any of the other fighters bother to cover their faces. On the one hand, he expects to be killed by an army that has already jailed him for a year, on the other, he and his fighters don’t want to make it easy.
Dozens of young men and teenagers carrying assault rifles patrol through the night on otherwise empty roads and guard the entrances to the 0.16-square-mile camp, home to more than 23,600 residents. They keep a lookout on barricades of twisted-metal beams. Palestinian youth have had most of their lives shaped by Netanyahu governments, all of which have been the most right wing in Israeli history — ending any hope that Israel would dismantle its occupation. However, his latest return to power amid a spreading West Bank revolt has ushered in an era of widespread settler attacks on civilians, encouraged by hardline cabinet ministers who believe in expelling Palestinians.
Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem have been raised amid the constant presence of Israeli security forces, evictions, and settlement expansion in the city they hope to make a capital some day. Just more than 50 miles away, most Gen Z Gazans have grown up trapped in the 25-mile-long coastal strip where drones rule the skies and battleships blockade the sea. Sea water is pumped into homes, and rivers of human waste flow into the Mediterranean because of Israeli bombing of water-filtration and sewage plants, as leaders from Hamas fight with periodic missile fire targeting Israel in an unending siege.
“Israel has left us no choice,” says Abu Nidal. “The occupation has proven that the more we are silent, the more it will take from us.”
A two-hour drive from Jenin, across Israel’s separation wall, a very different struggle for rights has been dominating the streets of Israel’s secular, economic capital. Jewish Israeli society has sharply divided over Netanyahu’s hardline coalition’s efforts to curtail the independence and power of the judiciary, leading to the biggest protest movement in the history of Israel — a battle over whether the country will continue to guarantee its citizens individual rights or subject them to religious nationalist values.
While Tel Aviv is one of the world’s most expensive cities, Jenin’s refugee camp is one of the poorest places under Israeli rule, and the rights of nearly 5 million occupied Palestinians aren’t being fought for by most of the protesters paralyzing the streets. Abu Nidal has been following the rise of Israel’s social unrest and isn’t neutral on what he sees as an internal fight in Israeli society. “I may feel happy because their society is tearing itself apart,” he says. “But don’t expect me to cheer for the oppression of Israelis by their own government.”
Demonstrators chant during a rally in Tel Aviv to protest the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul bill as the country begins celebrations for its 75th anniversary.
FOR THE PAST seven months, Tel Avivians of all ages have clogged the streets and freeways with dancing, banging drums, and starting bonfires often just blocks from Israel’s Ministry of Defense. On one spring-night protest, Yaron Rosen, a clean-cut 55-year-old Israeli Air Force brigadier general who was an architect of the army’s cyber division and liaised with heads of the NSA, stands on a grassy hill above the highway, hugging his son with joy. “We’re safeguarding our democracy,” he says.
Rosen is a leader of a movement of reserve soldiers that are threatening to refuse duty en masse in protest of the reforms. Divided into seven pieces of legislation, the overhaul of the justice system will give the government the power to override the Supreme Court, limit the court’s ability to exercise judicial review, and expand the influence of rabbinical courts into civil matters. A law shielding an indicted prime minister, like Netanyahu, from removal from office passed in March.
Rosen says soldiers are worried the country will lose the values they swore allegiance to and have risked their lives for. Looking out at the sea of Israeli flags jamming the highway in both directions, Rosen takes pride in a protest movement rooted in the country’s establishment and defending its founding values.
“Our oath is to protect Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” says Rosen about what motivates Brothers in Arms, the reservist organization that he represents, to protest. “That is what we owe our allegiance to.”
The protests are filled with Israel’s middle and upper classes: professors, students, lawyers, doctors, business owners, and tech workers — many of whom are also reserve soldiers in Israel’s conscript military. They have lost considerable political power since Netanyahu’s 2009 return to office and were quiet amid Israel’s booming economy and relative security, but since taking the streets this winter, they have gained the support of former prime ministers, leaders of the security services, tech, and the arms industry.
“These are the people that are holding the economy, that are holding the military,” says Rosen about the throngs of protesters blocking roads. “They are holding everything that is good about Israel’s society.”
Tension between the religious and secular establishments has run through Israeli society since the country’s creation, but in the past two decades, many Israelis have become far more religious and nationalistic. Netanyahu has responded to these trends with a hard-right vision for the country that mixes militarism, religiosity, and expansionism to cement a permanent system of separation from the Palestinians in all territory under Israeli control: Segregation is Netanyahu’s solution.
Returning to office under indictment on corruption charges for breach of trust, bribery, and fraud, Netanyahu built a coalition of hardline Israeli-settler-based parties committed to Jewish nationalist dominance and religion in public life. He appointed extremist Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of the Jewish Power Party who has been found guilty of inciting terrorism and advocates Israeli annexation of the West Bank and expulsions of Palestinians, as his national security minister. The Israeli military reportedly refused to conscript Ben Gvir because it considered him a security risk. Netanyahu also made Bezalel Smotrich his finance minister. Smotrich is a settler leader who has called to wipe out a Palestinian town since taking office and is hostile to women’s and LGBTQ rights; the far-right religious nationalist was also given control of Israel’s civil administration — which handles the military occupation’s civil affairs like building permits for Palestinians and Israeli settlers — to advance his maximalist agenda.
Netanyahu has understood the power of successful low-cost wars to unleash Israeli nationalism. He reaped the political rewards of an electorate becoming more hardline the less they saw of Palestinians, and launched four Gaza wars. When Netanyahu stoked a five-day conflict with Palestinian fighters in Gaza on May 9, the reservists showed up for duty, the weekly protests were canceled, and after months in decline, he rose in the polls. A week later, however, throngs of Israelis were back on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street. The generation of Palestinians and Israelis who grew up under Netanyahu are coming of age amid rebellion in the occupied territories and mass protests dividing Israel. Widespread discontent at the reality forged by a leader who shaped their entire lives is spilling out into the streets, while the gulf between Palestinians and Israelis has never been wider.
HOURS BEFORE THE first Passover Seder, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak overlooks the coastline from the living room of his luxury north Tel Aviv apartment tower. Considering the fate of Palestinians behind the walls, he wants to set the issue aside.
“We know the big elephant in the room is [our] relationship to the Palestinians,” says Israel’s 10th prime minister. “Let’s put it on the shelf.”
Barak defeated Netanyahu’s first government in 1999, and joined his second 10 years later as defense minister. His premiership is defined by the ending of Israel’s 18-year occupation of south Lebanon in 2000 and the failure to end its much longer occupation of Palestinian land in final-status peace talks the same year. His government collapsed amid the outbreak of the Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli military rule that raged from 2000 to 2005.
These days, the retired 81-year-old politician, still Israel’s most decorated soldier, is focused on the protest movement against Netanyahu’s legal reforms and calls on soldiers to refuse service if laws subordinating the Supreme Court to the government pass. Both Barak and Rosen are concerned that the legal overhaul will make Israelis more open to international prosecution for war crimes, but Barak doesn’t believe it should be a main focus. “It’s kind of protecting ourselves, myself included, from being arrested,” he says. It’s easy to see Barak as part of the older generation, when the political class were all former military brass. “There is a reason for officers, even for Bibi and ministers, to be worried about what will happen with the Hague.”
In a 1998 TV interview, Barak famously said, “If I were a Palestinian of the right age, I would join, at some point, one of the terrorist groups.” Today, he believes in using military containment to ignore the issue and focusing on what he believes is an existential threat to Israeli society. As he sees it, Israel’s future now hinges on whether “it will turn into dictatorship or not.”
The protests have created a broad tent that spans from feminists decked out as Margert Atwood’s Handmaids to former conservative PMs. Out of politics and out of prison, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert still carries the ease and polish of a man once referred to as Teflon for his ability to survive scandal, until he didn’t. He meets me in his modern central Tel Aviv office and fondly reminisces about relations with the Bush administration and former U.S. Secretary of State “Condi” Rice. Eager to address a U.S. audience, he feels compelled to warn America about how being an endless occupier has changed Israel.
Leaning back in the chair behind his desk, Olmert gently rocks back and forth under a large framed picture of himself with President George W. Bush at the White House. “Israel doesn’t want peace,” says the last Israeli prime minister to try to negotiate a final deal with Palestinian leaders and the first to launch a Gaza war, “[not] since I retired and Bibi took over.” He sees today’s divisions as the consequence of 14 years of Israeli disinterest in dealing with Palestinians.
Olmert, the first Israeli prime minister to be jailed for corruption, is appalled but not surprised by the current crisis. “We are governed today by a bunch of militants, nationalists, chauvinists, [and] radicals,” Olmert says. “Reckless, irresponsible, and totally inexperienced people.”
He doesn’t mince words about his successor: “Bibi Netanyahu is a narcissist. Bibi Netanyahu is a shallow person. Bibi Netanyahu doesn’t believe in anything.”
Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert attends a protest against the Israeli government’s plan to overhaul the justice system this July. “Bibi Netanyahu is a narcissist,” he tells Rolling Stone. “Bibi Netanyahu is a shallow person. Bibi Netanyahu doesn’t believe in anything.”
Olmert warns that his country has lost sight of any constraints and has become indifferent to its allies’ concerns. “We are arrogant,” he says emphatically. “We think that no one can hit us, that we can defeat everyone.”
Registering President Biden’s frosty relationship with Netanyahu, Olmert thinks it would take much stronger action from America, like reconsidering its special relationship with Israel before Israelis and their leaders change course. “Had such a thing been spelled out, I guess it may have had an enormous impact.”
Retired Supreme Court Justice Ayala Procaccia sees the reforms as a toxic package that will end judicial independence and destroy Israel’s fragile balance of power that has existed since the country’s establishment. The 82-year-old who adjudicated on Israel’s top court from 2001 to 2011 has become an advocate to preserve the impartiality of the bench and has taken to the stage at anti-government rallies to defend it.
Procaccia acknowledges inherent inequality in a court with jurisdiction over Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza that upholds different rights and legal systems based on nationality and citizenship while consistently greenlighting occupation and settlement policies. “There is an ongoing tension between the national principle, which also encompasses a very prominent religious component, and the democratic principle,” Procaccia says. “[And we’ve] faced an existential security threat since the establishment of the state, which hasn’t ceased but only changed.”
During her tenure as a leading Israeli jurist, Procaccia ruled in favor of the state’s efforts to demolish West Bank Palestinian communities on land that had been requisitioned by Israel. She also accepted government arguments for demolishing the family homes of Palestinian combatants found guilty of killing Israelis — an act of collective punishment that human-rights groups say constitute a war crime.
“The court has nonetheless followed the guidance of the security authorities and said that home demolitions are a preventative policy, a deterrence and not an act of collective punishment,” says the retired justice about the court’s perspective on a policy that has never been applied to the families of Israeli Jews found guilty of killing Palestinians.
Yet this track record of the court doesn’t impress a religious nationalist Netanyahu ally like Simcha Rothman, a key architect of the legal reforms and a chair of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee. Depicting the largely secular court as hostile to the rights of religious Jews in an increasingly religious country, he cites the Supreme Court striking down laws that entrench military exemptions for ultra Orthodox Jews.
“The court did interfere in many other aspects of life in Israel that have nothing to do with Judea and Samaria,” he scoffs, using the religious terms for the West Bank. The balding 42-year-old was a lawyer before being sent to Jerusalem as an elected Knesset member for Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party. He lives with his family in the small southern West Bank outpost of Pnei Kedem, and like many people living in settlements — considered illegal under international law — he works in Israel.
He is appalled that the court even weighed in to rule on Israel’s Jewish Nation State Law, a 2018 Basic Law that passed with a slim parliamentary majority during a previous Netanyahu government. The law, condemned by international human-rights groups as enshrining inequality, holds constitutional-like weight and effectively denies Palestinians national rights by exclusively defining national rights in Israel as belonging to the Jewish People. The Supreme Court upheld the law, but that doesn’t satisfy Rothman.
“The fact that the court even thought that you can discuss or debate or have a hearing on the validity of a basic law that says that Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people just shows you how crazy judicial activism has reached in Israel,” he says.
For Rothman, terrorism is a term that can be applied to Palestinians for a wide range of acts, but it’s one he won’t use to describe Jewish attacks on Palestinians. He is adamant that the Palestinian fighter who killed two settlers in the West Bank town of Huwara on Feb. 26 is a terrorist. However, he refuses to use the term to describe the hundreds of settlers who were protected by the Israeli army as they rampaged in the Palestinian town and surrounding villages later that night, setting homes ablaze, injuring more than a hundred people and killing one.
Rothman is in a combative mood, and throughout our interview, his tone is sharp. The government’s ability to overrule the Supreme Court is essential, he argues, to be able to carry out its elected mandate to voters. Rothman’s party advocates full Israeli annexation of the West Bank, taking over areas administered by the Palestinian Authority, but it is something he doesn’t believe even the current Supreme Court would block. He is reluctant to discuss what rights Palestinians would get under sovereign Israeli rule and is adamant in his denial of the national existence of Palestinians. “It’s about whether they are a nation that can act as a nation,” says Rothman. “And the answer, of course, is no.”
Palestinian nurse Elias al-Ashqar stands by a billboard bearing an obituary for his father, Abdel Hadi, killed during an Israeli raid in Nablus. When Israel conducted its deadliest action in the occupied West Bank in almost 20 years on Feb. 22, al-Ashqar says, he rushed to help the injured only to find his father among the dead.More
ELIAS AND MOHAMMAD al-Ashqar are in a state of shock. Sitting in the living room of their modest ground-floor family apartment in the Askar refugee camp on a brisk winter evening, they are surrounded by men from the community. The al-Ashqar brothers’ father, 61-year-old Abdel Hadi, had been shot and killed during an Israeli-army raid in the adjacent northern West Bank city of Nablus hours earlier.
The Israeli army stormed the crowded city at 10 a.m., opening fire as residents scrambled, abandoning their midmorning shopping to run for their lives down the winding streets. Elias, a 25-year-old nurse, wasn’t supposed to be working at the hospital. He had volunteered to take on an extra shift when casualties from a raid that would kill 11 people and wound more than 100 started arriving. While treating patients in the chaos of the overwhelmed ER, he took a minute to check the dead who had come in and received a horrific revelation.
“I was just looking at the beds to see who the martyrs were,” says the younger al-Ashqar brother. He pauses to collect himself. “I didn’t imagine that it would be my dad.”
It’s a tragedy far too familiar to the residents of the occupied territories. Last year was the most deadly year on record for West Bank Palestinians since the Second Intifada, with the U.N. calculating that 146 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem; 29 Israelis were killed in Palestinian attacks. Since Netanyahu’s return, 2023 is already almost as deadly as 2022.
Abdelhadi worked as a driving instructor. Providing for his family in the cramped camp conditions was a daily struggle in a place where opportunities are few while potential devastation is an army raid away. He had, according to family and witnesses, just finished praying on his morning break when he was shot in the street by the army as it pulled out of the city.
Al-Ashqar’s oldest son, Mohammad, 34, sits across the room feeling devastated. He describes his father as a kind and loving family man who worked hard to give him and his brother more than he had. An officer in the Palestinian security forces, Mohammad was in the radio room when he heard about the Israeli raid.
Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces police West Bank Palestinians but are barred from confronting the Israeli military or arresting settlers attacking their communities. As he had done during previous raids, Mohammad followed orders, but now he can no longer justify the command. He wants the PA security forces to start defending Palestinians during Israeli attacks. “To what extent will we be able to stay neutral and calm?” he asks.
The bloody Feb. 22 raid-turned-firefight was directed against the Lions’ Den, a new group of young Palestinian fighters that emerged in the summer of 2022. Hailing from the working-class neighborhoods around Nablus’ old city, the fighters have led armed attacks against Israeli soldiers and settlers around the northern West Bank while embroiling the army in firefights during raids. The Gen Z guerrillas, who say they are motivated to fight for national liberation rather than religion, started as a loose affiliation of men from across the Palestinian political spectrum, knowing one another from the streets and sharing the belief that freedom can only be won through force. Despite some of its leaders and members being the children of Palestinian security-force officials, they have confronted PA forces with the same intensity they use during Israeli military raids. Their goals are clear: Fight the system of occupation regardless of who’s enforcing it.
In calls for general strikes on their Telegram channels, groups like the Lions’ Den have regularly galvanized Palestinians with a text message to shutdown the West Bank and East Jerusalem in protest. At the same time, the PA has led an internal crackdown on its security forces in Nablus, arresting people it believed were supporting or defecting to the Lions’ Den.
Palestinians clash with Israeli security forces during a raid in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus on Feb. 22. Israeli troops killed 11 Palestinians in the raid, and wounded more than 100, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.
“The newly created armed groups in Nablus and Jenin and elsewhere are the future [that] people are now counting on,” says Khalil Shikaki. The 70-year-old political science professor is the director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and lives in Ramallah, a mountaintop city of 150,000 nine miles from Jerusalem that serves as the de facto capital of the PA. Recent polls he’s conducted show the majority of the Palestinians in the occupied territories support a renewed uprising and want to see the PA, run by the aging leadership of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), collapse because they believe it serves Israeli, rather than Palestinian, interests.
Barak seems to give credence to these concerns about the PA, describing how Israel offered to remove Hamas by force from Gaza and hand over power to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas when he was defense minister. “I will tell you how far we were ready to go with Abu Mazen to arrange for him to take over the Gaza Strip,” says the former Israeli leader, referring to the Palestinian president by his nom de guerre. “We [would] take the blood part and he refused, for some reason.”
Clandestine in the West Bank and isolated in its rule of Gaza for the past 16 years, Hamas’ mantle of resistance is now also being challenged by independent Gen Z West Bankers. Officially embracing the rebellion, the rival Palestinian leadership is not interested in expanding that fight from Gaza, according to Basim Naim, a Hamas spokesman and former Gaza health minister. He has lived through the bitter cost of devastating battles with Israel and, speaking on the phone from Gaza City, says his party is instead focused on supporting West Bank fighters and regionally coordinating a military strategy with Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“At this moment, we are not looking to escalate unless we are attacked,” says Naim, 60. “At the same time, if red lines are crossed in the West Bank, like at Al Aqsa — or mass deportations or crimes against our people — we are a part of the Palestinian people and cannot accept this.”
Husam Zomlot, PLO ambassador to the U.K., knows that the Palestinian public is outraged and disillusioned. He accuses Israel of using its agreements with Palestinians to further colonize Palestinian land. The former adviser to Abbas — and a Palestinian ambassador in Washington until the Trump administration closed the PLO mission — contends that rather than use its leverage with Israel, America pressures Palestinian leaders to quell resistance caused by Israeli actions. “The bottom line here is that the West still considers Israel to be the exception of every law,” says Zomlot, 50.
When I tell him about Barak’s comments about elephants on shelves he takes particular issue, describing the protests as indicative of a society where Israelis view Palestinians as expendable. “Both have one thing in common, which is the ‘elephant,’” says Zomlot about Netanyahu and Barak. “The shelf breaks and it comes down on your head,” he warns.
ON THE ISRAELI side of the wall but a nation apart, Israel’s Palestinian citizens have a lot to lose if a far-right government that has built a political career on calling them an enemy from within can sideline the Supreme Court. The community has always bitterly opposed Netanyahu, but during his 2021 Gaza war, bloody street clashes with hardline Jewish nationalists and Israeli police erupted as Palestinian citizens of Israel rose up against the war and their treatment in mixed Jewish-Palestinian Israeli cities. Yet, after a decade and a half of being left on their own to fight Netanyahu governments legislating away their rights, they have opted not to join these protests en masse.
Marching through the Palestinian-Israeli town of Sakhnin, nestled in the hills of the Galilee, Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Knesset member for the left-wing Arab-Jewish unity party Hadash, commemorated Land Day on March 30 amid a sea of Palestinian flags. It’s a day of protest marking the 1976 Israeli-government seizure of Palestinian land in northern Israel for Jewish settlement and the six people killed by Israeli forces during the general strike to resist the dispossession.
“That happened not because we were citizens of Israel, but happened because we are Palestinians,” says the 58-year-old Palestinian-Israeli woman from the northern mixed city Acre about the day’s continued significance to Palestinian-Israelis.
Aida Touma-Suleiman
Touma-Suleiman is not surprised by the lack of her community’s participation in the protests, seeing them as focused on the rights Jewish Israelis are worried about losing with no consideration of the rights long denied to Palestinians. “The symbols and the discourse of the protests are not inclusive,” she says. “On the contrary, [they are] pushing Palestinians away.”
Israelis unwillingness to address the conditions Palestinians are forced to live in is no surprise to Gonen Ben Itzhak, a leading anti-Netanyahu activist who campaigned against government corruption and now is on the front lines of the fight against the legal reforms. “The truth is that we still don’t see them as equals,” he says about Palestinians, occupied residents, and citizens of Israel alike. “We as a country, we as citizens, we don’t see them as equals.”
Ben Itzhak would know. Now a lawyer, the stocky 52-year-old spent more than a decade as a senior officer in the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, turning high-value collaborators and targeting Palestinian leaders. Joining the Israeli intelligence organization in 1996, following the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin by a right-wing religious nationalist, Ben Itzhak depicts a security service where inequality is an operating procedure. Israeli Jewish targets, he says, will be monitored to prevent attacks on Palestinians, while Palestinians will be assassinated to prevent attacks on Israelis.
Acknowledging routine abuse and torture of Palestinian detainees by the Shin Bet, he disagrees with Rosen and thinks people who commit war crimes should be prosecuted regardless of what happens to the court. Ben Itzhak was personally involved in Israeli assassinations but says the campaign to kill Palestinian leaders in the 2000 uprising was done for the bragging rights of officers who ordered them rather than security. He points to the 2001 assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa, the leader of the Marxist-oriented Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine whose killing is often credited with spiraling the armed conflict. “He wasn’t important,” says Ben Itzhak. “He wasn’t a terrorist.”
Ben Itzhak sees himself as part of Israel’s occupation machine. Sitting at a cafe in Florentin — South Tel Aviv’s gentrified liberal neighborhood known for its dogs, bars, and pungent smell of weed — he sees Israel’s current divisions as shaped by Israelis ability to ignore their unending domination of Palestinians.
Students and lawyer Gonen Ben Itzhak (right) protest on the blocked Ayalon Highway during the demonstration against the legal reform. More than 130,000 people protested in Tel Aviv against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and its controversial legal reform.
“As long as we can live here in Tel Aviv, drink our coffee, have some weed, and have fun, everything is OK,” Ben Itzhak says. “As long as we don’t hear it, we don’t care about what’s going on.”
The former head of the Shin Bet’s Ramallah area office says the only thing he has in common with settlers he once protected is Hebrew. He believes Netanyahu’s government is hoping for a new Intifada and says that Israel will be able to easily contain a wider uprising, in turn using it as a pretext for further dispossessing of West Bank Palestinians while disenfranchising Palestinian citizens. “For this government, a third Intifada is the best thing they can have.”
Many secular liberal Israelis have checked out from politics in cities that feel closer to New York than the West Bank and Gaza. But for the Gen Z Jewish Israeli activists fighting for Palestinian rights, segregation shapes who they meet and how they resist.
At 17 years old, Ayelet Covo grew up completely separated from Palestinians beyond the walls. Most of their life has been shaped under Netanyahu governments, but on April 1, Covo stood in the anti-occupation block of Tel Aviv’s weekly democracy protest and set their army-enlistment papers ablaze with a dozen other teenagers being conscripted.
“This is an attempt to get people to realize that there wasn’t a democracy before the judicial reform,” says Covo, sitting in a Tel Aviv cafe a few days after publicly torching their conscription papers.
Sporting short brown hair and a jean jacket with a patch of the black-and-red Antifa flags, Covo, who uses the pronouns they/them, says that the discrimination they experience as a trans person wasn’t what opened their eyes to Palestinian oppression. “For me, it’s not a factor,” says Covo. “It’s just down to the fact that I don’t think that what’s going on is right.”
Numbering in the hundreds in a sea of tens of thousands, the anti-occupation bloc is the hub for Israel’s small left to gather and attempt to engage anti-judicial-overhaul protesters about equal rights for all. In the shadow of Israel’s Ministry of Defense, they demand an end to occupation and denounce Israel as an apartheid state in Hebrew.
Covo is part of a tradition of military refusal that emerged during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the First Intifada in 1987. At the height of the Second Intifada, a handful of pilots refused to fly missions in the occupied territories while teenage activists went to jail for refusing to enlist. Every generation since has had a small military refusal movement that, unlike the reservist protests defending the Supreme Court, has been about the rights of the occupied and refusing to be part of a military regime that violates them.
“I want freedom and equality from the river to the sea,” says Covo, appropriating a traditional Palestinian national rallying call into advocacy for a binational democracy.
Previous refusnik generations met with Palestinian activists in the occupied territories, joined their protests in the Second Intifada, and worked with rural communities to build campaigns against settlement and wall expansion. However, born after walls were built and restrictions tightened, Covo has never been to Gaza, Ramallah, Nablus, or Jenin. They have only seen the reality of Palestinians under military rule on screens and heard about it from Palestinian friends in East Jerusalem and Israel.
Their youth has been shaped by Netanyahu governments turning late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Olmert’s walls that segregate Palestinians from one another into pillars of Israel’s solution. Seen by his opponents in the Israeli establishment as the force that will end democracy, Netanyahu has ruled long enough to shape Israel in his image and make the unequal reality he inherited into a permanent solution.
Covo has grown up in a far more interconnected world, yet segregation at home is all they have known: “The idea [that Israel is] the only democracy in the Middle East is a fucking lie.”
Matan Cohen contributed to reporting in Israel.
Ahmad al-Bazz contributed to reporting in Jenin and Nablus.
The will to fight and die against unending Israeli military rule has been spreading through refugee camps and working-class neighborhoods in the occupied West Bank for almost a year. Violence escalated this summer as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu plunged deeper into multiple political crises. Israeli settlers have rampaged in Palestinian villages, while Israel has expanded settlements and carried out large-scale ground and air assaults on Jenin’s refugee camp. Claiming it was necessary to rout out fighters who have launched attacks on Israelis and to destroy explosive-making sites, the Israeli military has forced thousands of civilians to flee. Israeli drone strikes killed Palestinian fighters from the sky as soldiers invaded people’s homes and bulldozers ripped up the camp’s winding streets — smashing its water and electricity infrastructures. Israeli Apache helicopters have launched missile attacks in the West Bank for the first time in nearly 20 years, while armored convoys rolling through Jenin are met with assault-rifle ambushes and have been hit by IEDs from the likes of Abu Nidal and his men.
“Abu Nidal” inside the Jenin refugee camp
Throughout his career, Netanyahu has used military escalation and settlement expansion to rally public support. However, fighters like Abu Nidal say that the roots of their rebellion are in the rage of a generation being forced to grow up in the shadow of Israel’s walls and segregated by its checkpoints without hope of things changing.
Before taking up arms, Abu Nidal studied to become an engineer but saw no escape from the harsh conditions in an overcrowded camp built as temporary relief for his great-grandparents’ generation in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Occupied by Israel since the 1967 war, Jenin has been a hub of Palestinian armed resistance for more than 20 years, and its fighters have carried out attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians across Israel and the West Bank. Its refugee camp was razed to the ground by the Israeli army in 2002 at the height of the Second Intifada, only to be rebuilt and raided regularly ever since.
Abu Nidal insists on the nom de guerre for security precautions. Yet, despite drones buzzing overhead, neither Abu Nidal (Arabic for “Father of the Struggle”) nor any of the other fighters bother to cover their faces. On the one hand, he expects to be killed by an army that has already jailed him for a year, on the other, he and his fighters don’t want to make it easy.
Dozens of young men and teenagers carrying assault rifles patrol through the night on otherwise empty roads and guard the entrances to the 0.16-square-mile camp, home to more than 23,600 residents. They keep a lookout on barricades of twisted-metal beams. Palestinian youth have had most of their lives shaped by Netanyahu governments, all of which have been the most right wing in Israeli history — ending any hope that Israel would dismantle its occupation. However, his latest return to power amid a spreading West Bank revolt has ushered in an era of widespread settler attacks on civilians, encouraged by hardline cabinet ministers who believe in expelling Palestinians.
Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem have been raised amid the constant presence of Israeli security forces, evictions, and settlement expansion in the city they hope to make a capital some day. Just more than 50 miles away, most Gen Z Gazans have grown up trapped in the 25-mile-long coastal strip where drones rule the skies and battleships blockade the sea. Sea water is pumped into homes, and rivers of human waste flow into the Mediterranean because of Israeli bombing of water-filtration and sewage plants, as leaders from Hamas fight with periodic missile fire targeting Israel in an unending siege.
“Israel has left us no choice,” says Abu Nidal. “The occupation has proven that the more we are silent, the more it will take from us.”
A two-hour drive from Jenin, across Israel’s separation wall, a very different struggle for rights has been dominating the streets of Israel’s secular, economic capital. Jewish Israeli society has sharply divided over Netanyahu’s hardline coalition’s efforts to curtail the independence and power of the judiciary, leading to the biggest protest movement in the history of Israel — a battle over whether the country will continue to guarantee its citizens individual rights or subject them to religious nationalist values.
While Tel Aviv is one of the world’s most expensive cities, Jenin’s refugee camp is one of the poorest places under Israeli rule, and the rights of nearly 5 million occupied Palestinians aren’t being fought for by most of the protesters paralyzing the streets. Abu Nidal has been following the rise of Israel’s social unrest and isn’t neutral on what he sees as an internal fight in Israeli society. “I may feel happy because their society is tearing itself apart,” he says. “But don’t expect me to cheer for the oppression of Israelis by their own government.”
Demonstrators chant during a rally in Tel Aviv to protest the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul bill as the country begins celebrations for its 75th anniversary.
FOR THE PAST seven months, Tel Avivians of all ages have clogged the streets and freeways with dancing, banging drums, and starting bonfires often just blocks from Israel’s Ministry of Defense. On one spring-night protest, Yaron Rosen, a clean-cut 55-year-old Israeli Air Force brigadier general who was an architect of the army’s cyber division and liaised with heads of the NSA, stands on a grassy hill above the highway, hugging his son with joy. “We’re safeguarding our democracy,” he says.
Rosen is a leader of a movement of reserve soldiers that are threatening to refuse duty en masse in protest of the reforms. Divided into seven pieces of legislation, the overhaul of the justice system will give the government the power to override the Supreme Court, limit the court’s ability to exercise judicial review, and expand the influence of rabbinical courts into civil matters. A law shielding an indicted prime minister, like Netanyahu, from removal from office passed in March.
Rosen says soldiers are worried the country will lose the values they swore allegiance to and have risked their lives for. Looking out at the sea of Israeli flags jamming the highway in both directions, Rosen takes pride in a protest movement rooted in the country’s establishment and defending its founding values.
“Our oath is to protect Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” says Rosen about what motivates Brothers in Arms, the reservist organization that he represents, to protest. “That is what we owe our allegiance to.”
The protests are filled with Israel’s middle and upper classes: professors, students, lawyers, doctors, business owners, and tech workers — many of whom are also reserve soldiers in Israel’s conscript military. They have lost considerable political power since Netanyahu’s 2009 return to office and were quiet amid Israel’s booming economy and relative security, but since taking the streets this winter, they have gained the support of former prime ministers, leaders of the security services, tech, and the arms industry.
“These are the people that are holding the economy, that are holding the military,” says Rosen about the throngs of protesters blocking roads. “They are holding everything that is good about Israel’s society.”
Tension between the religious and secular establishments has run through Israeli society since the country’s creation, but in the past two decades, many Israelis have become far more religious and nationalistic. Netanyahu has responded to these trends with a hard-right vision for the country that mixes militarism, religiosity, and expansionism to cement a permanent system of separation from the Palestinians in all territory under Israeli control: Segregation is Netanyahu’s solution.
Returning to office under indictment on corruption charges for breach of trust, bribery, and fraud, Netanyahu built a coalition of hardline Israeli-settler-based parties committed to Jewish nationalist dominance and religion in public life. He appointed extremist Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of the Jewish Power Party who has been found guilty of inciting terrorism and advocates Israeli annexation of the West Bank and expulsions of Palestinians, as his national security minister. The Israeli military reportedly refused to conscript Ben Gvir because it considered him a security risk. Netanyahu also made Bezalel Smotrich his finance minister. Smotrich is a settler leader who has called to wipe out a Palestinian town since taking office and is hostile to women’s and LGBTQ rights; the far-right religious nationalist was also given control of Israel’s civil administration — which handles the military occupation’s civil affairs like building permits for Palestinians and Israeli settlers — to advance his maximalist agenda.
Netanyahu has understood the power of successful low-cost wars to unleash Israeli nationalism. He reaped the political rewards of an electorate becoming more hardline the less they saw of Palestinians, and launched four Gaza wars. When Netanyahu stoked a five-day conflict with Palestinian fighters in Gaza on May 9, the reservists showed up for duty, the weekly protests were canceled, and after months in decline, he rose in the polls. A week later, however, throngs of Israelis were back on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street. The generation of Palestinians and Israelis who grew up under Netanyahu are coming of age amid rebellion in the occupied territories and mass protests dividing Israel. Widespread discontent at the reality forged by a leader who shaped their entire lives is spilling out into the streets, while the gulf between Palestinians and Israelis has never been wider.
HOURS BEFORE THE first Passover Seder, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak overlooks the coastline from the living room of his luxury north Tel Aviv apartment tower. Considering the fate of Palestinians behind the walls, he wants to set the issue aside.
“We know the big elephant in the room is [our] relationship to the Palestinians,” says Israel’s 10th prime minister. “Let’s put it on the shelf.”
Barak defeated Netanyahu’s first government in 1999, and joined his second 10 years later as defense minister. His premiership is defined by the ending of Israel’s 18-year occupation of south Lebanon in 2000 and the failure to end its much longer occupation of Palestinian land in final-status peace talks the same year. His government collapsed amid the outbreak of the Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli military rule that raged from 2000 to 2005.
These days, the retired 81-year-old politician, still Israel’s most decorated soldier, is focused on the protest movement against Netanyahu’s legal reforms and calls on soldiers to refuse service if laws subordinating the Supreme Court to the government pass. Both Barak and Rosen are concerned that the legal overhaul will make Israelis more open to international prosecution for war crimes, but Barak doesn’t believe it should be a main focus. “It’s kind of protecting ourselves, myself included, from being arrested,” he says. It’s easy to see Barak as part of the older generation, when the political class were all former military brass. “There is a reason for officers, even for Bibi and ministers, to be worried about what will happen with the Hague.”
In a 1998 TV interview, Barak famously said, “If I were a Palestinian of the right age, I would join, at some point, one of the terrorist groups.” Today, he believes in using military containment to ignore the issue and focusing on what he believes is an existential threat to Israeli society. As he sees it, Israel’s future now hinges on whether “it will turn into dictatorship or not.”
The protests have created a broad tent that spans from feminists decked out as Margert Atwood’s Handmaids to former conservative PMs. Out of politics and out of prison, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert still carries the ease and polish of a man once referred to as Teflon for his ability to survive scandal, until he didn’t. He meets me in his modern central Tel Aviv office and fondly reminisces about relations with the Bush administration and former U.S. Secretary of State “Condi” Rice. Eager to address a U.S. audience, he feels compelled to warn America about how being an endless occupier has changed Israel.
Leaning back in the chair behind his desk, Olmert gently rocks back and forth under a large framed picture of himself with President George W. Bush at the White House. “Israel doesn’t want peace,” says the last Israeli prime minister to try to negotiate a final deal with Palestinian leaders and the first to launch a Gaza war, “[not] since I retired and Bibi took over.” He sees today’s divisions as the consequence of 14 years of Israeli disinterest in dealing with Palestinians.
Olmert, the first Israeli prime minister to be jailed for corruption, is appalled but not surprised by the current crisis. “We are governed today by a bunch of militants, nationalists, chauvinists, [and] radicals,” Olmert says. “Reckless, irresponsible, and totally inexperienced people.”
He doesn’t mince words about his successor: “Bibi Netanyahu is a narcissist. Bibi Netanyahu is a shallow person. Bibi Netanyahu doesn’t believe in anything.”
Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert attends a protest against the Israeli government’s plan to overhaul the justice system this July. “Bibi Netanyahu is a narcissist,” he tells Rolling Stone. “Bibi Netanyahu is a shallow person. Bibi Netanyahu doesn’t believe in anything.”
Olmert warns that his country has lost sight of any constraints and has become indifferent to its allies’ concerns. “We are arrogant,” he says emphatically. “We think that no one can hit us, that we can defeat everyone.”
Registering President Biden’s frosty relationship with Netanyahu, Olmert thinks it would take much stronger action from America, like reconsidering its special relationship with Israel before Israelis and their leaders change course. “Had such a thing been spelled out, I guess it may have had an enormous impact.”
Retired Supreme Court Justice Ayala Procaccia sees the reforms as a toxic package that will end judicial independence and destroy Israel’s fragile balance of power that has existed since the country’s establishment. The 82-year-old who adjudicated on Israel’s top court from 2001 to 2011 has become an advocate to preserve the impartiality of the bench and has taken to the stage at anti-government rallies to defend it.
Procaccia acknowledges inherent inequality in a court with jurisdiction over Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza that upholds different rights and legal systems based on nationality and citizenship while consistently greenlighting occupation and settlement policies. “There is an ongoing tension between the national principle, which also encompasses a very prominent religious component, and the democratic principle,” Procaccia says. “[And we’ve] faced an existential security threat since the establishment of the state, which hasn’t ceased but only changed.”
During her tenure as a leading Israeli jurist, Procaccia ruled in favor of the state’s efforts to demolish West Bank Palestinian communities on land that had been requisitioned by Israel. She also accepted government arguments for demolishing the family homes of Palestinian combatants found guilty of killing Israelis — an act of collective punishment that human-rights groups say constitute a war crime.
“The court has nonetheless followed the guidance of the security authorities and said that home demolitions are a preventative policy, a deterrence and not an act of collective punishment,” says the retired justice about the court’s perspective on a policy that has never been applied to the families of Israeli Jews found guilty of killing Palestinians.
Yet this track record of the court doesn’t impress a religious nationalist Netanyahu ally like Simcha Rothman, a key architect of the legal reforms and a chair of the Knesset’s Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee. Depicting the largely secular court as hostile to the rights of religious Jews in an increasingly religious country, he cites the Supreme Court striking down laws that entrench military exemptions for ultra Orthodox Jews.
“The court did interfere in many other aspects of life in Israel that have nothing to do with Judea and Samaria,” he scoffs, using the religious terms for the West Bank. The balding 42-year-old was a lawyer before being sent to Jerusalem as an elected Knesset member for Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party. He lives with his family in the small southern West Bank outpost of Pnei Kedem, and like many people living in settlements — considered illegal under international law — he works in Israel.
He is appalled that the court even weighed in to rule on Israel’s Jewish Nation State Law, a 2018 Basic Law that passed with a slim parliamentary majority during a previous Netanyahu government. The law, condemned by international human-rights groups as enshrining inequality, holds constitutional-like weight and effectively denies Palestinians national rights by exclusively defining national rights in Israel as belonging to the Jewish People. The Supreme Court upheld the law, but that doesn’t satisfy Rothman.
“The fact that the court even thought that you can discuss or debate or have a hearing on the validity of a basic law that says that Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people just shows you how crazy judicial activism has reached in Israel,” he says.
For Rothman, terrorism is a term that can be applied to Palestinians for a wide range of acts, but it’s one he won’t use to describe Jewish attacks on Palestinians. He is adamant that the Palestinian fighter who killed two settlers in the West Bank town of Huwara on Feb. 26 is a terrorist. However, he refuses to use the term to describe the hundreds of settlers who were protected by the Israeli army as they rampaged in the Palestinian town and surrounding villages later that night, setting homes ablaze, injuring more than a hundred people and killing one.
Rothman is in a combative mood, and throughout our interview, his tone is sharp. The government’s ability to overrule the Supreme Court is essential, he argues, to be able to carry out its elected mandate to voters. Rothman’s party advocates full Israeli annexation of the West Bank, taking over areas administered by the Palestinian Authority, but it is something he doesn’t believe even the current Supreme Court would block. He is reluctant to discuss what rights Palestinians would get under sovereign Israeli rule and is adamant in his denial of the national existence of Palestinians. “It’s about whether they are a nation that can act as a nation,” says Rothman. “And the answer, of course, is no.”
Palestinian nurse Elias al-Ashqar stands by a billboard bearing an obituary for his father, Abdel Hadi, killed during an Israeli raid in Nablus. When Israel conducted its deadliest action in the occupied West Bank in almost 20 years on Feb. 22, al-Ashqar says, he rushed to help the injured only to find his father among the dead.More
ELIAS AND MOHAMMAD al-Ashqar are in a state of shock. Sitting in the living room of their modest ground-floor family apartment in the Askar refugee camp on a brisk winter evening, they are surrounded by men from the community. The al-Ashqar brothers’ father, 61-year-old Abdel Hadi, had been shot and killed during an Israeli-army raid in the adjacent northern West Bank city of Nablus hours earlier.
The Israeli army stormed the crowded city at 10 a.m., opening fire as residents scrambled, abandoning their midmorning shopping to run for their lives down the winding streets. Elias, a 25-year-old nurse, wasn’t supposed to be working at the hospital. He had volunteered to take on an extra shift when casualties from a raid that would kill 11 people and wound more than 100 started arriving. While treating patients in the chaos of the overwhelmed ER, he took a minute to check the dead who had come in and received a horrific revelation.
“I was just looking at the beds to see who the martyrs were,” says the younger al-Ashqar brother. He pauses to collect himself. “I didn’t imagine that it would be my dad.”
It’s a tragedy far too familiar to the residents of the occupied territories. Last year was the most deadly year on record for West Bank Palestinians since the Second Intifada, with the U.N. calculating that 146 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank and East Jerusalem; 29 Israelis were killed in Palestinian attacks. Since Netanyahu’s return, 2023 is already almost as deadly as 2022.
Abdelhadi worked as a driving instructor. Providing for his family in the cramped camp conditions was a daily struggle in a place where opportunities are few while potential devastation is an army raid away. He had, according to family and witnesses, just finished praying on his morning break when he was shot in the street by the army as it pulled out of the city.
Al-Ashqar’s oldest son, Mohammad, 34, sits across the room feeling devastated. He describes his father as a kind and loving family man who worked hard to give him and his brother more than he had. An officer in the Palestinian security forces, Mohammad was in the radio room when he heard about the Israeli raid.
Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces police West Bank Palestinians but are barred from confronting the Israeli military or arresting settlers attacking their communities. As he had done during previous raids, Mohammad followed orders, but now he can no longer justify the command. He wants the PA security forces to start defending Palestinians during Israeli attacks. “To what extent will we be able to stay neutral and calm?” he asks.
The bloody Feb. 22 raid-turned-firefight was directed against the Lions’ Den, a new group of young Palestinian fighters that emerged in the summer of 2022. Hailing from the working-class neighborhoods around Nablus’ old city, the fighters have led armed attacks against Israeli soldiers and settlers around the northern West Bank while embroiling the army in firefights during raids. The Gen Z guerrillas, who say they are motivated to fight for national liberation rather than religion, started as a loose affiliation of men from across the Palestinian political spectrum, knowing one another from the streets and sharing the belief that freedom can only be won through force. Despite some of its leaders and members being the children of Palestinian security-force officials, they have confronted PA forces with the same intensity they use during Israeli military raids. Their goals are clear: Fight the system of occupation regardless of who’s enforcing it.
In calls for general strikes on their Telegram channels, groups like the Lions’ Den have regularly galvanized Palestinians with a text message to shutdown the West Bank and East Jerusalem in protest. At the same time, the PA has led an internal crackdown on its security forces in Nablus, arresting people it believed were supporting or defecting to the Lions’ Den.
Palestinians clash with Israeli security forces during a raid in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus on Feb. 22. Israeli troops killed 11 Palestinians in the raid, and wounded more than 100, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.
“The newly created armed groups in Nablus and Jenin and elsewhere are the future [that] people are now counting on,” says Khalil Shikaki. The 70-year-old political science professor is the director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and lives in Ramallah, a mountaintop city of 150,000 nine miles from Jerusalem that serves as the de facto capital of the PA. Recent polls he’s conducted show the majority of the Palestinians in the occupied territories support a renewed uprising and want to see the PA, run by the aging leadership of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), collapse because they believe it serves Israeli, rather than Palestinian, interests.
Barak seems to give credence to these concerns about the PA, describing how Israel offered to remove Hamas by force from Gaza and hand over power to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas when he was defense minister. “I will tell you how far we were ready to go with Abu Mazen to arrange for him to take over the Gaza Strip,” says the former Israeli leader, referring to the Palestinian president by his nom de guerre. “We [would] take the blood part and he refused, for some reason.”
Clandestine in the West Bank and isolated in its rule of Gaza for the past 16 years, Hamas’ mantle of resistance is now also being challenged by independent Gen Z West Bankers. Officially embracing the rebellion, the rival Palestinian leadership is not interested in expanding that fight from Gaza, according to Basim Naim, a Hamas spokesman and former Gaza health minister. He has lived through the bitter cost of devastating battles with Israel and, speaking on the phone from Gaza City, says his party is instead focused on supporting West Bank fighters and regionally coordinating a military strategy with Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“At this moment, we are not looking to escalate unless we are attacked,” says Naim, 60. “At the same time, if red lines are crossed in the West Bank, like at Al Aqsa — or mass deportations or crimes against our people — we are a part of the Palestinian people and cannot accept this.”
Husam Zomlot, PLO ambassador to the U.K., knows that the Palestinian public is outraged and disillusioned. He accuses Israel of using its agreements with Palestinians to further colonize Palestinian land. The former adviser to Abbas — and a Palestinian ambassador in Washington until the Trump administration closed the PLO mission — contends that rather than use its leverage with Israel, America pressures Palestinian leaders to quell resistance caused by Israeli actions. “The bottom line here is that the West still considers Israel to be the exception of every law,” says Zomlot, 50.
When I tell him about Barak’s comments about elephants on shelves he takes particular issue, describing the protests as indicative of a society where Israelis view Palestinians as expendable. “Both have one thing in common, which is the ‘elephant,’” says Zomlot about Netanyahu and Barak. “The shelf breaks and it comes down on your head,” he warns.
ON THE ISRAELI side of the wall but a nation apart, Israel’s Palestinian citizens have a lot to lose if a far-right government that has built a political career on calling them an enemy from within can sideline the Supreme Court. The community has always bitterly opposed Netanyahu, but during his 2021 Gaza war, bloody street clashes with hardline Jewish nationalists and Israeli police erupted as Palestinian citizens of Israel rose up against the war and their treatment in mixed Jewish-Palestinian Israeli cities. Yet, after a decade and a half of being left on their own to fight Netanyahu governments legislating away their rights, they have opted not to join these protests en masse.
Marching through the Palestinian-Israeli town of Sakhnin, nestled in the hills of the Galilee, Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Knesset member for the left-wing Arab-Jewish unity party Hadash, commemorated Land Day on March 30 amid a sea of Palestinian flags. It’s a day of protest marking the 1976 Israeli-government seizure of Palestinian land in northern Israel for Jewish settlement and the six people killed by Israeli forces during the general strike to resist the dispossession.
“That happened not because we were citizens of Israel, but happened because we are Palestinians,” says the 58-year-old Palestinian-Israeli woman from the northern mixed city Acre about the day’s continued significance to Palestinian-Israelis.
Aida Touma-Suleiman
Touma-Suleiman is not surprised by the lack of her community’s participation in the protests, seeing them as focused on the rights Jewish Israelis are worried about losing with no consideration of the rights long denied to Palestinians. “The symbols and the discourse of the protests are not inclusive,” she says. “On the contrary, [they are] pushing Palestinians away.”
Israelis unwillingness to address the conditions Palestinians are forced to live in is no surprise to Gonen Ben Itzhak, a leading anti-Netanyahu activist who campaigned against government corruption and now is on the front lines of the fight against the legal reforms. “The truth is that we still don’t see them as equals,” he says about Palestinians, occupied residents, and citizens of Israel alike. “We as a country, we as citizens, we don’t see them as equals.”
Ben Itzhak would know. Now a lawyer, the stocky 52-year-old spent more than a decade as a senior officer in the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, turning high-value collaborators and targeting Palestinian leaders. Joining the Israeli intelligence organization in 1996, following the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin by a right-wing religious nationalist, Ben Itzhak depicts a security service where inequality is an operating procedure. Israeli Jewish targets, he says, will be monitored to prevent attacks on Palestinians, while Palestinians will be assassinated to prevent attacks on Israelis.
Acknowledging routine abuse and torture of Palestinian detainees by the Shin Bet, he disagrees with Rosen and thinks people who commit war crimes should be prosecuted regardless of what happens to the court. Ben Itzhak was personally involved in Israeli assassinations but says the campaign to kill Palestinian leaders in the 2000 uprising was done for the bragging rights of officers who ordered them rather than security. He points to the 2001 assassination of Abu Ali Mustafa, the leader of the Marxist-oriented Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine whose killing is often credited with spiraling the armed conflict. “He wasn’t important,” says Ben Itzhak. “He wasn’t a terrorist.”
Ben Itzhak sees himself as part of Israel’s occupation machine. Sitting at a cafe in Florentin — South Tel Aviv’s gentrified liberal neighborhood known for its dogs, bars, and pungent smell of weed — he sees Israel’s current divisions as shaped by Israelis ability to ignore their unending domination of Palestinians.
Students and lawyer Gonen Ben Itzhak (right) protest on the blocked Ayalon Highway during the demonstration against the legal reform. More than 130,000 people protested in Tel Aviv against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and its controversial legal reform.
“As long as we can live here in Tel Aviv, drink our coffee, have some weed, and have fun, everything is OK,” Ben Itzhak says. “As long as we don’t hear it, we don’t care about what’s going on.”
The former head of the Shin Bet’s Ramallah area office says the only thing he has in common with settlers he once protected is Hebrew. He believes Netanyahu’s government is hoping for a new Intifada and says that Israel will be able to easily contain a wider uprising, in turn using it as a pretext for further dispossessing of West Bank Palestinians while disenfranchising Palestinian citizens. “For this government, a third Intifada is the best thing they can have.”
Many secular liberal Israelis have checked out from politics in cities that feel closer to New York than the West Bank and Gaza. But for the Gen Z Jewish Israeli activists fighting for Palestinian rights, segregation shapes who they meet and how they resist.
At 17 years old, Ayelet Covo grew up completely separated from Palestinians beyond the walls. Most of their life has been shaped under Netanyahu governments, but on April 1, Covo stood in the anti-occupation block of Tel Aviv’s weekly democracy protest and set their army-enlistment papers ablaze with a dozen other teenagers being conscripted.
“This is an attempt to get people to realize that there wasn’t a democracy before the judicial reform,” says Covo, sitting in a Tel Aviv cafe a few days after publicly torching their conscription papers.
Sporting short brown hair and a jean jacket with a patch of the black-and-red Antifa flags, Covo, who uses the pronouns they/them, says that the discrimination they experience as a trans person wasn’t what opened their eyes to Palestinian oppression. “For me, it’s not a factor,” says Covo. “It’s just down to the fact that I don’t think that what’s going on is right.”
Numbering in the hundreds in a sea of tens of thousands, the anti-occupation bloc is the hub for Israel’s small left to gather and attempt to engage anti-judicial-overhaul protesters about equal rights for all. In the shadow of Israel’s Ministry of Defense, they demand an end to occupation and denounce Israel as an apartheid state in Hebrew.
Covo is part of a tradition of military refusal that emerged during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the First Intifada in 1987. At the height of the Second Intifada, a handful of pilots refused to fly missions in the occupied territories while teenage activists went to jail for refusing to enlist. Every generation since has had a small military refusal movement that, unlike the reservist protests defending the Supreme Court, has been about the rights of the occupied and refusing to be part of a military regime that violates them.
“I want freedom and equality from the river to the sea,” says Covo, appropriating a traditional Palestinian national rallying call into advocacy for a binational democracy.
Previous refusnik generations met with Palestinian activists in the occupied territories, joined their protests in the Second Intifada, and worked with rural communities to build campaigns against settlement and wall expansion. However, born after walls were built and restrictions tightened, Covo has never been to Gaza, Ramallah, Nablus, or Jenin. They have only seen the reality of Palestinians under military rule on screens and heard about it from Palestinian friends in East Jerusalem and Israel.
Their youth has been shaped by Netanyahu governments turning late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Olmert’s walls that segregate Palestinians from one another into pillars of Israel’s solution. Seen by his opponents in the Israeli establishment as the force that will end democracy, Netanyahu has ruled long enough to shape Israel in his image and make the unequal reality he inherited into a permanent solution.
Covo has grown up in a far more interconnected world, yet segregation at home is all they have known: “The idea [that Israel is] the only democracy in the Middle East is a fucking lie.”
Matan Cohen contributed to reporting in Israel.
Ahmad al-Bazz contributed to reporting in Jenin and Nablus.
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