Lessons from Israel's Pro-Democracy Protest Movement

Six months of mass, nonviolent action have stalled Bibi's far-right government in its tracks; what can American activists learn from that?

I’ve spent the last two months talking to Israeli pro-democracy protest organizers (along with a few of their American counterparts) to understand how they have managed to galvanize so many people for so long in their battle to stave off efforts by Bibi Netanyahu’s far-right government to destroy the independence of the country’s judicial system. My piece on that question is now out in The New Republic. Even if you aren’t interested in Israel (which I have longstanding personal ties to), I think there’s a lot to pay attention to.

What the protest movement in Israel has achieved so far is pretty impressive. Since January, tens and then hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been out in the streets every Saturday, and not just in Tel Aviv, but all over the country. They've effectively stalled Bibi's decision to pass the judicial overhaul (though he’s now trying to sneak it through using “salami” tactics). They've been completely nonviolent, though they've also embraced several very disruptive forms of nonviolence, like blocking traffic, surrounding the homes of rightwing politicians, preventing far-right ministers from speaking in public fora, and even encouraging soldiers to refuse or to threaten to refuse army or reserve service, breaking a longstanding taboo in Israeli politics. We had nothing like that at the height of the 2017-18 anti-Trump “resistance” here in America—one of the questions I delve into in the piece is why.

One important difference is how money and resources are flowing. In late May, when the leadership of the coordinating group at the heart of the Israeli movement, Mattei Ha'Maavak (the "Struggle Headquarters" is how we'd translate it) said that they had raised the equivalent of $13.5 million since January, that really got my attention. That would be the equivalent of almost a half billion dollars if you adjust for the US population. That is literally one year of total Ford Foundation funding. Imagine if in 2017, the "resistance" that arose to stop Trump had that kind of money, and instead of hoarding it to bulk up their staff headcounts they spent it the way the Israelis have, mostly by funding almost every spending request of several hundred affiliated protest groups, which are organized by issue focus (LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, anti-occupation etc), by identity (parents, doctors, etc.), and by locality. (One fascinating by-product of the Covid lockdown in Israel is that it restricted people to within one kilometer of their homes, so when an earlier round of anti-Bibi protest got going in 2020, this restriction fostered the rise of many hyperlocal protest circles, who stayed connected via Whatsapp groups, which are now the main way information daisy chains across the larger movement).

Another important difference is how the Israeli center, as well as the left, has been involved in the protests. Here in the US the Women’s March and Indivisible, the two key groups that arose in the post-2016 vacuum of leadership on the liberal side of the aisle, got captured by the left. In Israel the first protests against Bibi’s judicial coup also were led from the left, notably Jewish-Arab groups and LGBTQ groups, which meant what the public saw in week one was a lot of Palestinian and rainbow flags. But then Mattei Ha’Ma’avak decided to try to shift the frame and the symbolism of the movement, literally flooding the zone with Israeli flags. In my New Republic piece, I get into the details of how that happened and what it means for the movement.

This group has moved decisively to frame the struggle against Bibi's government very effectively as a fight to protect democracy against authoritarianism, as opposed to left vs right, or in boring policy terms as a debate over how the judiciary should be run. And even though many of the spokespeople are from the center, they aren’t mincing their words about the threat they see, clearing defining the struggle in terms that have helped convince millions of their compatriots that their country’s future is at stake.

Finally, they've been very strategic in understanding that their job (in trying to block the judicial overhaul and related antidemocratic measures) is to avoid aligning with any of the opposition parties while assiduously trying to cultivate support from what they call the "liberal right" -- basically, more secular Likud voters. And they've been informed by an almost weekly stream of high quality survey research produced by a social psychology institute called aChord, that has thrown itself into constant and in-depth testing of public opinion on everything related to the protests, from the big questions down to whether people thought well of the crowd of protesters who swarmed Bibi's wife one night while she was getting her hair done. We had nothing like that of shared collective awareness of which messages and tactics were resonating back in the early anti-Trump days.

I don't know how the story in Israel will end, but as it approaches the six-month mark of mass mobilization at a scale that should impress anyone who has looked at Erica Chenoweth’s research on successful anti-authoritarian movements, it’s still going strong.  And I don't think a look back to 2017 in the US is just an exercise in 20-20 hindsight. It's entirely possible that either Trump or someone like DeSantis will be running the US in less than two years, and if that’s the case, perhaps we can do some things differently next time.

Please give the piece a read and share it with others. I’ve tried to encapsulate a lot of ideas in it, and no doubt have gotten some things wrong or stretched a comparison too far. I’m looking forward to the conversation.