Adam Keller of the Israeli peace bloc Gush Shalom writes:

On the morning of Tuesday 11 May we woke up to the news that 21 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza, nine of them minors, and that two Israeli women had been killed in Ashkelon (one of them, it later turned out, was a migrant worker from India). Since then, the death toll on both sides had more than doubled. 

Then came the email which I was expecting. Noa Levy of the Hadash party sent an urgent call for protests in Tel Aviv and Haifa. A second message, from the Forum of Israeli and Palestinian Bereaved Families and Combatants for Peace, endorsed the Hadash call and added a Haifa protest venue initiated by the Haifa Women for Women Centre.

The government is playing with fire [and] all of us [may] get burned! In a desperate attempt to cling to power, [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu is dragging us into war, killing and suffering and pain for both peoples. Stop the escalation! Cease the fire! Stop the expulsion of families from Sheikh Jarrah, stop the police rampage in East Jerusalem. There can be no peace and no quiet as long as the West Bank lives under occupation and Gaza suffers a suffocating siege. The solution: an end to the occupation, an end to the siege of Gaza, and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, with East Jerusalem as its capital. We all deserve to live in freedom and security. The time to act is now!

This was followed by several hours of frantic work at the computer and phone, spreading the message by Facebook and WhatsApp to all who nay be waiting for such a call on such a day. And then, looking out from the bus to Tel Aviv, the Kugel Boulevard, the main thoroughfare on which all buses to Tel Aviv travel, it was a completely normal daily bustle. On King George Street in Tel Aviv there were already several hundred people gathered outside the Likud Party headquarters. Among them were familiar faces, the determined minority of Israelis who always show up on such days, as in 2009 and 2014. 

“Stop the fire, stop the bloodshed!” chanted several hundred throats. And “On both sides of the border / Children want to live!” and “Sheikh Jarrah, don’t despair / We will end the occupation yet!” and Also “Gaza, Gaza, don’t despair / We will end the siege yet!” and “Netanyahu, Netanyahu / The dock at The Hague awaits you!”…

Last Friday 7 May… public attention in Israel was totally focused on the delicate dance of party politics. Netanyahu, facing three serious corruption charges at the Jerusalem District Court, had just failed in his efforts to form a new cabinet. The mandate passed to the opposition Change Block, whose leaders embarked on delicate negotiations aimed at forming a heterogeneous government coalition comprising rightwingers and leftwing and centre parties which have virtually nothing in common except the wish to see the end of Netanyahu. We had very mixed feelings about it, especially since the intended new prime minister, Naftali Bennet, is, if anything, more rightwing than Netanyahu. Still, the new government would have very strong mechanisms of “mutual veto” in place that would prevent Bennet from doing too much harm – though the same would also prevent the new government from doing much good, either. And this government would be the very first in Israeli history to rely on an Arab party for its parliamentary majority (other than the Rabin government in 1995, whose tenure was cut short by the Rabin’s assassination).

Anyway, there were very concrete plans to have the new cabinet ready for parliamentary approval by Tuesday 11May. The anti-corruption demonstrators who had been demonstrating every week outside the prime minister’s residence, were joking about when will the removal firm arrive to take away the Netanyahu family furniture. But Netanyahu had other irons in the fire.

First, there was the planned expulsion of hundreds of Palestinians from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem. Dozens of them were due to be expelled within days and extreme rightwing settlers were planning to enter into their vacated homes. Protests in Sheikh Jarrah and elsewhere in East Jerusalem were met by brutal police repression. Then protests spread to Al-Haram al-Sharif (Temple Mount) compound, and so did the police repression. The police started to shoot rubber bullets directly into the demonstrators’ faces, causing them to lose eyes – at least two of them losing both eyes and becoming blind for the rest of their lives. Footage of the police breaking into the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site and a place considered even by secular Palestinians as a major part of their national heritage, escalated the protests.

Add to this the plan to have thousands of radical young settlers hold the provocative “Dance of the Flags” right through the Damascus Gate and the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, and the police and government reiterated hour after hour that the “Dance of the Flags” would take place as scheduled. It was then that Hamas in Gaza threatened to retaliate for the attack on the Palestinians of Jerusalem, and the government declared that it would not bend to “the ultimatums of terrorists”. And at the very last moment the “Dance” was cancelled – but it was too late. At 6.00pm Hamas fired a salvo of seven rockets at the outskirts of Jerusalem – which in fact caused no casualties or damage, but which precipitated the deadly Israeli deadly retaliation on Gaza.

Now, a bit more than 48 hours later, here we are, in the midst of an escalating war, with the Israeli air force destroying high rise buildings in Gaza and proudly announcing the “elimination” of senior Hamas activists – but unable to hinder the Palestinians’ ability to go on shooting rockets. And relations between Jews and Arabs, fellow citizens of Israel, have descended to unprecedented depths of inter-communal violence.

In Lod, the police declared a night curfew “to stop the rampaging Arabs” but Arab inhabitants refused to abide and were involved in violent confrontations with police around a local mosque. In Bat Yam and Tiberias, mobs of extreme rightwing Jews carried out random assaults on Arabs and smashed Arab-owned shops. [Despite all this, the Israeli government refused to declare] a ceasefire. “No, no, no ceasefire – we must teach Hamas a lesson!”

Of course no ceasefire. Why should Netanyahu want a ceasefire? Every day in which the shooting continues is one more day of keeping that dreaded movers’ truck away from the prime minister’s residence, one more day of keeping power in his own hands. If there was concrete proof that Netanyahu did it all consciously and deliberately, it would make up criminal charges far more serious than those he is facing at the District Court of Jerusalem. But any such evidence is probably classified Top Secret and would only be published 50 years from now. So, we can’t prove that he did it deliberately, though there can be little doubt about it. We can only end the war and immediately afterwards get rid of him.

Perhaps what is happening now will shake President Biden out of the attitude of keeping a low profile on Israel and the Palestinians? After all, all this mess had fallen on his desk with quite a loud clatter.