The protest movement is weaponizing the hostage crisis - opinion

Internal Israeli discord was on full display before October 7. White hot rallies surrounded judicial reform.

Sufficiently complacent about the security of their state, too many Israelis designated their fellow citizens as their mortal enemies – a luxury no Israeli has any right to indulge in. Hamas took the temperature of the Israeli street and struck a blow from which it will take Israel generations to recover.

Israelis responded with a simple cris-de-coeur: unity!

Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, both opposition members and former IDF chiefs of staff, joined the war cabinet as minister and observer, respectively. Reservists flooded bases in unprecedented numbers. Protests largely paused, and where they did take place, they focused on the urgent need to retrieve all of the 251 hostages kidnapped into Gaza.

Like the veil concealing an unsightly bride waiting to be wed, the thin lace of unity could conceal Israel’s true visage for only the briefest of periods. Pulled back by a calloused hand, Zion’s coarsened, true countenance was revealed once more. Internecine fighting– and yes, disunity– have returned to the public square.

The protest movement convulses again, this time calling for the toppling of the government. Never mind that they previously desecrated the holiest chamber of the modern state – its security apparatus – by co-opting it for demonstrations. Ignore that they explicitly called for IDF service members to defect. The moral superiority of the movement is still beyond reproach. So goes their demand of the onlooker.

Straining for ingratiation into the rowdy zeitgeist, Gantz and Eisenkot bolted the war cabinet, collapsed the unity government, and thus endorsed the movement for Israelis to race back toward each other’s throats. Lamentably, all of the above was to be expected.

Much has been written about the role of the prime minister and his government in the months preceding October 7. Far too underreported are the dastardly tactics employed by the protest leaders, then and now. Their first act was seen and overlooked. Its encore must not play out unimpeded.

The most cynical trick in the movement’s playbook is the coupling of anti-government protests – a national political prerogative – to a national, supra-political imperative. First, they politicized the military. Now, they politicize the hostage families. Calls for the government’s downfall alternate with calls for an immediate hostage deal, as if any Israeli could unilaterally create such a situation.

The distress of the hostage families cannot be overstated. They are at once fragile and unbreakable. No one can criticize their efforts to reunite with loved ones.

Yet the protest movement’s leadership now willfully capitalizes upon their righteous plea for the return of their loved ones by brazenly binding themselves to it to bring down the government. As a result, they are injecting a tainted, mismatched contaminant into the heart of what must remain a pure and non-political issue. The tactic is shameless.

Israel’s print and television media are complicit. For months, they have repeated the conspiratorial canard that Prime Minister Netanyahu is deliberately torpedoing all hostage-release deals to extend his term in office. To accept this smear is to believe that Israel’s prime minister and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar share a common consideration: a keen readiness to prolong the suffering of Israel’s hostages to ensure their survival, whether political or literal.

The alignment of Israel’s protest movement with the shameful narrative of Qatar and Egypt, key financiers and enablers of the October 7 massacre, tells us just how malign a falsehood this is.

Their assertion is disproved by two reality sets. The prime minister’s actions are the first. The second is his political opponents’ behavior.

The daring rescue missions that returned eight Israelis all carried tremendous political risk for the prime minister. That risk was assessed and assumed, proving that political expediency is not what influences the prime minister’s decision-making when it comes to the hostages.

Added to that is the tragic, steadily rising casualty count among Israel’s defenders, reflecting an ongoing determination to recover the hostages, dismantle Hamas, and squeeze the enemy with a focused military pressure that has endured longer than any of Israel’s previous wars and resulted in the return of 105 hostages during the first tranche of released captives.

These efforts have continued despite unprecedented foreign pressure from Israel’s allies, a delegitimization campaign that rampages throughout the foreign press and is endemic in international organizations, and repeated calls from former Israeli defense establishment figures to end the war.

In April, the prime minister approved a hostage-release proposal described by US Secretary of State Blinken as “extremely generous.” Yet his opponents continue to assign blame to him for Hamas’s intransigence rather than place it where it belongs: at the feet of the genocidal, jihadist group that holds Israel’s abductees. Meanwhile, they intensify their calls for the overthrow of the government through the weaponization of the hostage crisis.

Netanyahu's ineffective alternative 

NETANYAHU’S MOST LIKELY declared alternatives have already demonstrated their ineffectiveness. Gantz and Eisenkot spent the bulk of the war inside the war cabinet. They were active participants in the decision-making, the results of which they now condemn. They were part of the so-far-spurned efforts to release the remaining hostages.

Unlike Netanyahu, upon reaching the brick wall of the implacably evil Sinwar, the duo crumpled into an exhausted heap, engaged in a series of highly politicized interviews, and had their ineptitude washed away by the same Israeli press that platformed them. They called for elections, knowing they lacked the power to bring them about and would thus never be tasked with leading the charge for which they were advocating. All the while, they propagated the conspiracy that Netanyahu’s obstructionism was the reason the hostages were not yet home.

Yair Lapid, the official leader of the opposition, couldn’t even find his way to joining the unity government. The man who baselessly proclaimed his prowess on the world stage failed to marshal those powers for the benefit of Israel’s languishing captives and delegitimized soldiers from within the government.

Gantz, Eisenkot, and Lapid, one after another, have either deserted or evaded Israel’s government during its most critical moments, falsely presenting themselves as potential saviors if elected. The protest movement recognizes that these personalities cannot rescue the hostages from their plight. Still, it is onto the politically concave chests of this triumvirate that they continue to pin the false hopes of a hostage deal.

Netanyahu is doing what prime ministers must do: pushing on toward a resolution of the historic disaster that occurred under his watch, for which he must take ultimate responsibility.

Protesting against a government is as legitimate a process as any other in any democratic society. Profaning the sacred as a means of doing so is not.

We should not forgive the leaders of the protest movement for politically exploiting the hostage families after October 7, any more than we should forgive them for politically hijacking Israel’s military before that horrific day.

Their legacy is deep, red, and dark. Such strategies are unforgivable. Israelis must see the truth behind the veil, dismiss the discord sown, and instead cleave to the spirit of unity. It need not be an abandoned aspiration.

The writer is CEO of The MirYam Institute and host of The Benjamin Anthony Show podcast. Follow him at www.MirYamInstitute.org.