Thanks for the reply and sorry it took me a few days to answer. Also sorry if my reply seems disjointed. We broadened the scope from just the Israeli protests for a hostage deal to, really, the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it was hard to give the correct background while keeping it relatively short and trying to account for my own bias, so the reply was written in parts. Hopefully I was able to draw a coherent, if simplified, picture.
First of all, you got the gist of what I’m saying. There are a few things I’d say were a bit off, but most of it isn’t worth going point-by-point. I also agree with many things you said, and you’ve actually described the stance of the Israeli left as well as I could at one point (and now you have to keep reading if you want to know where…).
You’re absolutely correct saying the two camps I’ve described are not left-right. Notice I didn’t say “left”, rather “left-leaning”.
The left-right axis in Israel is best described as the answer to “Do you think Israel should aspire towards a 2 state solution with the Palestinians?” Or, how it’s usually framed, “Are the Palestinians a partner for peace?”. If this seems like a trivial question, please keep in mind this is really a mirror of the Palestinian “Is Israel a partner for peace?”, which is a highly contested question among Palestinians.
It’s also correct to say that in the last year there’s been an increase in Israeli aggression toward Palestinians (This is a view shared by a lot of Israelis, in light of the extremist government). However, in the long run, both sides are basically equally to blame(there’s A LOT of historical context I’m not going to go into. Just as a starting point, you can look up the Oslo accords in the 90s, the 2005 Israeli disengagement from Gaza, the 2007 Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip and the blockade that followed). If the protests are against specific actions taken by the Israeli government in the last year, I’m all for it. That said, I got the distinct feeling that the protesters aren’t protesting against the treatment of Palestinians during the last year, but for a Palestinian state, in which case the protests should be directed against Hamas and Israel both. I understand why people would want to protest against Israel, but I don’t understand how one can protest against Israel and not against Hamas using the same metrics.
Hamas has been planning the Oct. 7th attack for at least a year, and invested in infrastructures to support terrorist acts for many years prior (underground tunnels, some of them leading to Israeli settlements, and some used to hide militants, weapons and hostages. After Israel’s invasion to Gaza, Hamas leadership said they have no obligation to protect Gazan civilians), so saying the Oct. 7th attack is related to Israeli aggression in the last year might have merit (talking purely about causal relationship, not justification), but there is enough reason to believe that the attack would have happened either way. Furthermore, if Hamas gets a “free pass” since their actions were a result of Israeli transgression, why does Israel not get a “free pass” as their actions are a result of Hamas aggression? This approach, where every side’s violence is justified using previous violence committed by the other side, is called a cycle of violence, and is one of the main lenses through which the Israeli left is looking at the broad confrontation between Israel and the Palestinians (we call it “the cycle of bloodshed”). I can talk about Hamas firing rockets at Israeli civilian targets as of 2004, and before that there were suicide bombings going all the way back to Hamas’s foundation, and other terror attacks going back before the Israeli control over the west bank and Gaza (that is, before what you refer to as “aparthide”). I’m saying this not to try and convince you that “the Palestinians started it!”, but to explain why “They started it!” is not a call for peace, but a call for more violence.
The former paragraph also relates to the third point (Why Oct. 7th happened), but if to address that point directly - saying “October 7th happened because of a shocking waste of resources and lapse in security from Israel” is like saying "The Gazan casualties are due to Hamas investing their resources into attacking Israel instead of caring for their civilians’'. That’s blaming the victim on top of contributing to the cycle of violence (Also, and this is really a side note, as of now there are about 35,000 Gazan casualties in total. estimates are that about 2/3 of them were uninvolved in fighting).
“The second point is much more difficult, because it’s not clear what-so-ever that the Israeli government is interested in defeating or making irrelevant Hamas through political means. Israel effectively kaibashed every political approach to peace (before Oct 7th). It just doesn’t seem like they are operating in good faith.” Welcome to the Israeli left. Feel free to grab a cup of coffee and chat with the many guests we have here from the moderate centre. You came just in time for our lecture on “How Netanyahu and the far-left propped Hamas to shoot down any option for a diplomatic solution”. The highlights include Smotrich, the current Israeli minister of finance, stating that “Hamas is an asset and Fatah is a burden”, and Netanyahu saying “Those who want to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state should support the strengthening of Hamas and the transfer of money [from Qatar] to Hamas”.
Regarding Israel being a “bad ally” to the US - I agree, and so do the Israeli left and large portions (most?) of the centrists. The way we phrase it is that the current government is creating a rift between Israel and the US and abandoning the values that are shared among both countries. For us, this is a moral issue (we kinda like those shared values), but also a practical one should the US withhold the support it gives us. Don’t know what Israeli news sources you’re following, but it was much talked about in the last weeks at least. BTW, the Israeli far-right, that de-facto controls the coalition, is very unconcerned about this due to, IMO, self delusion. But this also seems too narrow a reason to protest. If the US were to withdraw all political and financial support from Israel, and Israel would continue acting the same, would most protesters be content? And how does this explain protests in countries that don’t provide Israel with support?
To finish, I’d like to address the use of “apartheid” when talking about Israel. A Palestinian call fall into one of 3 categories - Those who have Israeli citizenship, those who live in the west bank and those who live in Gaza. They each live under a different legal infrastructure.
Israel has about two million Arab citizens (I’m saying “Arab” to include Palestinians, and other Arab groups like Durze as well as “ethnically” Palestinians who don’t identify as such nationally) who have the same rights as any Jewish person (small asterix - Arabs in west Jerusalem aren’t citizens, though are offered citizenship and have most of the same rights including, for example, voting in the local elections). There is institutional racism that’s more akin to the way black people are (“are”, not “were”) treated in some parts of the US. The Arabs in the (annexed) Golan heights also have full citizenship. As of 2006, Hamas is the sole sovereign in Gaza and there are no Jewish people living there, so “apartheid” doesn’t apply. We’re left with the Arabs in the west bank, who mostly do live under a discriminatory rule system (Yet still have their own government and law system). However, the distinction isn’t race, rather citizenship. For example, some Israeli Arabs moved into Palestinian settlements in the west bank (due to lower cost of living), and they still retain the same rights they had when living in Israel-proper. The Israeli left refers to the Palestinians without an Israeli citizenship as “living under occupation” and to the Israeli control of the disputed territories (excluding the Golan heights) is referred to as “the occupation” (we naturally view this as morally wrong). This, to me, seems much more correct than “apartheid”, especially considering that “apartheid” is used to specifically refer to the system in South Africa, and even the west bank is far from it. If anything, apartheid a-la South Africa is what the far-right in Israel has in mind (for both Israeli Arabs and Arabs living under occupation), and that’s one of the reasons the distinction between “occupation” and “apartheid” is important in practice - if the far-left will have their way (which seems implausible, yet not absolutely out of the question), those who say Palestinians live under apartheid now will have a hard time explaining, or even understanding, exactly how the situation changed for the worse.