Israel’s Parliament was to be the focus of resurgent antigovernment protests on Monday as it prepared to open its summer session after a six-week recess.
Questions have been swirling about the stability of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, and the protests, primarily calling for early elections, came days after deep divisions within the wartime emergency cabinet burst into the open.
Before the assault on southern Israel on Oct. 7, mass rallies against a judicial overhaul plan, advanced by Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right and religiously ultraconservative governing coalition, had rocked Israel for months. The grass-roots leaders of those antigovernment protests had largely stepped back after the Hamas-led attacks, but on Monday, during a “Day of Disturbance,” many re-emerged to lead demonstrations.
Shikma Bressler, a particle physicist who became the face of the protests last year but who lowered her profile as Israel waged war in Gaza, led an action on Monday that saw convoys of hundreds of cars driving slowly on highways across the country, snarling traffic and converging on Jerusalem.
A large rally was planned outside Parliament to coincide with the assembly’s opening ceremony, scheduled to start at 4 p.m.
There was a growing sense in Israel that the semblance of national unity inspired by Oct. 7 and the war, as well as the period of grace granted to Mr. Netanyahu, was over.
A protest group called Brothers and Sisters in Arms, made up of military reservists, was back out on the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway on Monday morning, holding portraits of hostages who remain in Gaza. The group rose to prominence during last year’s protests against the judicial overhaul plans.
At that time, the group made contentious calls for volunteer reserve soldiers to quit the military, arguing that the judicial plan undermined the democracy they had signed up to serve. But on Oct. 7, the group’s leaders abruptly reversed course and urged all those who received call-up orders to join the war.
The 2023 protests focused on domestic issues like the judicial overhaul plan, the nature of Israeli democracy and religious-secular tensions. By contrast, the scattered protests that have been building up over recent months have centered on demands for the government to bring the hostages home and to take responsibility for the policy and intelligence failures before Oct. 7.
Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has so far refused to take any personal responsibility for those failures. His defense minister, Yoav Gallant; and Benny Gantz, a former military chief and another key member of the war cabinet, have implicitly accused Mr. Netanyahu of putting his own political survival ahead of national security by appeasing his far-right coalition partners in the way he is prosecuting the war.
Mr. Gantz and Mr. Gallant have, in recent days, publicly demanded that Mr. Netanyahu come up with a decisive and coherent strategy for postwar Gaza, where Hamas keeps returning to areas that the Israeli military says it has cleared. Mr. Gantz issued an ultimatum that he would quit the government by June 8 if there was no clear path forward.
Mr. Gantz’s centrist National Unity party joined the government in October out of a sense of responsibility, he said at the time. His party’s departure would not topple Mr. Netanyahu, whose coalition would still command a majority of 64 seats in the 120-seat Parliament.
But Monday’s protests underscored popular frustration with the government, which has so far failed to achieve its stated goal of eliminating Hamas in Gaza.
“No majority of 64 will stop the people,” Ms. Bressler, the protest leader, said as the convoys prepared to set out.
Source Agencies
