Among the Protesters

The fundamental question isn’t whether Israel should be a democracy. It’s whether it should be like everywhere else.

By Antonio Garcia Martinez, TABLET

I’m jet lagged and jostled, in the back of a Maserati SUV driven maniacally by a guy named “Shay” on Israel’s Highway 1 between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Next to me, also crammed between shrink-wrapped cases of drinking water, is Maya Zehavi, a member of the Israeli crypto community and the reason why I’m here. Riding shotgun is Sarit Radman, the mother of Moshe Radman, one of the handful of ad hoc leaders of Israel’s protest movement around a judicial reform bill that has divided the nation. The goal is to deliver ima Radman to her son at the head of the procession for the big photo op as they enter Jerusalem.

The Radman-finding challenge is made harder by the fact that the protest, a snaking, chanting mass absolutely festooned with Israeli flags, is hogging up most of the highway save for the left-most lane which is bottlenecked with cars. Wedged between police motorcycles and howling protesters, even Shay gunning the Maserati’s sonorous V8 engine gets us nowhere.

Eifo Radman!? Eifo Radman!? (Where is Radman?) our driver Shay yells at random mishtarah who’ve dismounted their motorcycles and are trying to channel the chaos. The sun is broiling, and some of the marchers have walked all the way from Tel Aviv, over 60 kilometers away. Many are soaked in sweat, holding homemade signs, and chanting slogans with transported looks on their faces. The march to Jerusalem was concocted, Arab Spring-style, in a WhatsApp group a few days ago, but the emotion culminates months of Israeli political infighting and cultural clashes between the secular left and the religious right.

Surprisingly, one of the police responds with directions to Radman, and Shay hurls us through a gap in the flag-waving bodies toward Jerusalem. We drop off ima Radman for the photo op—soon to be shared on WhatsApp and thence Twitter and the mainstream media—before packing into Shay’s Maserati again and roaring up the rolling Judean Hills toward Jerusalem proper.

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We stop in the protest’s staging area: under the monumental Calatrava-designed Chords Bridge, where Ben-Gurion Boulevard becomes Weizman Boulevard in front of the institute dedicated to Rav Kook (the founder of Religious Zionism). The irony of the secular revolt against religious rule happening in front of Mossad HaRav Kook, itself surrounded by housing blocks full of religious families, isn’t lost on me. Orthodox families linger around, contemplating the gathering mob in mute bemusement on their day of rest.

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We walk up the light-rail tracks of the bridge—we won’t be run over since the trains don’t run on Shabbat—to catch the bird’s-eye view of the unfolding scene. Maya’s shirt shouts SAVE OUR STARTUP NATION and she too is carrying an Israeli flag. Beneath us, there’s a pooling mass of people as the torrent of highway protesters crests the last hill into the “City of Peace.”

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“OK, Maya, you absolutely insisted I come to this straight after my flight. I know the background story here, but why are you panicking?”

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Then Maya hits me with a phrase I’d hear (and read) a lot in the ensuing weeks: “if we lose, then all of Israel will be like Jerusalem.”

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I’m looking around at the spectacular Calatrava bridge and Jerusalem stone buildings stretching in all directions across the Judean hills, and not getting the dystopia vibe.

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Right that second, HaShem strike me blind if I’m lying (and I’ve got the photo to prove it) a Chabadnik, holding one of their ???????? flags, walks past a protester waving a Pride flag. They utterly ignore each other. “OK,” I say to Maya, “I’m waiting for the theocratic fascism here.”

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“You have no idea how hard it was to do a Pride Parade in Jerusalem this year,” she replies.

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This business of Jerusalem being a horrifying warning of what’s to come if the judicial reform goes through was a recurring refrain in both my time there, and after. Two weeks later, Haaretz writer Chaim Levinson continued the trope with his thundering prophecy: “Jerusalem’s Crumbling Present Is Israel’s Likely Future.”

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To Levinson’s view, Jerusalem once had history and culture, but no longer: There were intelligentsia and journalists [i.e., people like him]. People would come to clubs from all over the country to get their freak on. There were alternative bands, independent record labels, DJs, and artists.

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“Culture,” to Levinson, is of course the cosmopolitan salad bar of restaurants and musicians and media, a consumable good with accompanying Yelp reviews, a nonbinding spectacle in an otherwise atomized life with individual choice as the only moral good. Culture is most definitely not the kumsitz at the Kotel on Tisha B’Av singing “MiMaamakim” shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of American Modern Orthodox kids and a few settler youth (as I did, or tried to, with my terrible Hebrew).

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With such a superficial notion of culture, Levinson is mystified why diaspora Jews want to spend time there: “[Jerusalem] lives on immigration from France and the U.S., where people are so homesick for the motherland that they are blind to its flaws,” he writes. Levinson describes his flight to Tel Aviv like an exodus from a crumbling failed state to the sunlit uplands of cosmopolitanism (“moving to another country would have been more difficult”).

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Let me tell you what Tel Aviv feels like to a longtime resident of that same nomadic cosmopolitanism: It’s a rough-on-the-edges Miami with a high-rise office park of startups plopped into the middle of it. Israelis should feel rightly proud of building such a metropolis out of nothing, but it’s like every other city in the global Borg now: Third wave coffee, craft beer, Asian fusion, artsy tattoo studios, “coworking” spaces, techno-capitalism driving skyrocketing real estate … the full liberal catastrophe.

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As I stood in Sarona, in a street scene that resembled Miami’s Brickell, it occurred to me: What the moneyed Jew in Paris or New York can’t find anywhere other than Israel is precisely that Kotel scene in Jerusalem that I experienced. That’s why diaspora Jews buy in Jerusalem instead of Tel Aviv: They don’t want a slightly Jewy version of Soho or Oberkampf. They want the historical capital of the Jewish people. They don’t want what you can now get everywhere from San Francisco to New York to London, even in stops like Boise or Reno. The Borg’s inhabitants—the professional-managerial worker bee, the sociopath startup founder, the leftist activist, the suave VC, the tattooed baristas, an overworked underclass—are the same the world over: the bugman with a thousand faces. They want something else altogether.

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Other American parallels came to mind: This business of denigrating the opposition’s home turf as pathetically backward and benighted sounded eerily familiar. The number of times I’ve had to bite my tongue over the past few years while some Californian explained to me how DeSantis has subsumed Florida into knuckle-dragging fascism—imagine being in Miami and thinking “fascism!”—is beyond recall at this point.

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I’m wary of analogizing foreign politics to the American domestic political sphere—the classic mistake of the American provincial. But as my time among the protesters wore on, the Israeli drama felt more and more like a remake of the same American Netflix show—just with different actors, backdrop, and plot details.

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“[T]he facts,” Levinson intones, “point to Haredi cities not being particularly attractive … It may be a matter of priorities: Synagogues instead of theaters, mikvahs instead of soccer fields, cholent shops rather than haute cuisine.”

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Every secular Israeli in Tel Aviv, attempting to frame the political problem to me, would do the same: The entirety of their political opposition, and the problem bedeviling Israel, was the benefits-consuming, military-service-avoiding Haredim. But the problem is, the 13% of the Israeli population that’s Haredi isn’t enough to get you the 64 Knesset seats in the current ruling coalition.

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It’s exactly what happened with the American left after Trump’s electoral victory, somehow thinking that there are enough bucktoothed racist rednecks to win 46% of the popular vote. You see, if we just didn’t have these Haredi deplorables, matters would be just fine, goes the standard line. It’s best to pretend one’s enemies are backward, knuckle-dragging zealots, rather than your fellow citizens who simply aren’t buying the political future you’re selling. That’s a much more bitter pill to swallow, and one the Israeli left finds as unswallowable now as the American left did in 2016.

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So what does the secular Israeli left do instead?

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It proclaims that the end of their political regime (at the hands of democracy) is the end of democracy itself, with unbridled horrors to surely follow. This is the panicked death rattle of every liberal elite confronting an electoral revolt: après moi, le fascisme! That the anti-judicial reform protesters should call themselves “pro-democracy” is ironic doublespeak: By any objective description, what the anti-reform crowd wants is a check on democratic power via an unelected judiciary. That’s a valid political prerogative, and one that many constitutions (including the American) enshrine, but let’s be clear what the goal here is. They want that democratic brake for a good reason: Their side is destined to lose many elections to come.

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Here, the Israeli remake of the Netflix show deviates a bit from the plot of the American original.

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While right-wing populism might win here or there—Trump in the U.S. or Bolsonaro in Brazil—it’s mostly an electoral fluke that gets reset in the next election, as it has with Biden and Lula retaking power in their respective countries. Israel however, unlike almost any other democracy, has only gotten more religious and moved more to the right in recent years. The answer to “why?” is so simple I can answer it anecdotally: When I had Shabbat dinner at my secular Israeli friends’ house, they’d introduce me to their two or three children. When I broke the Tisha B’Av fast with my Orthodox friend, his children numbered eight. In a democracy, demographics have a way of becoming hard politics very fast, which is what we’re seeing in Israel now. Democracy is removing the old secular Ashkenazi elite from power, which is why they must cry “Democracy!” as they mobilize to avoid their own political demise.

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