Families want Netanyahu out

Among the crowd of protesters gathered beneath the Knesset to demand Binyamin Netanyahu’s resignation, Eran Litman described his final phone call with his terrified daughter on the morning of October 7.

“She was scared and looking for somewhere to hide,” the physicist said, holding up a picture of his youngest child outside the fortress-like Israeli parliament.

Ten minutes after the end of their call, Oriya Litman Ricardo, 22, was killed fleeing the Supernova music festival, the carefree rave in the Negev desert that turned into a massacre. “I spoke to the police,” Litman said. “They told me people were coming to help.No-onecame.”

Netanyahu’s popularity has nosedived following the attack by Hamas, as Israeli voters struggle to forgive the self-styled strongman for presiding over the worst single loss of Jewish lives since the Holocaust.

In the last poll before that weekend, Likud, the right-wing party led by Netanyahu, was effectively tied with National Unity, the opposition party of Benny Gantz, the former head of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).

Now, Likud would win just 20 seats out of 120 seats in the Knesset compared with National Unity’s 40, according to the most recent poll for Maariv, a Hebrew-language newspaper. Asked whether Netanyahu or Gantz was better suited to be prime minister, 52% said Gantz while only 27% said Netanyahu and 21% did not know.

Like Netanyahu, Litman’s family home is in Caesarea, a city on the Mediterranean coast, but he had driven to Jerusalem to join other bereaved families who now gather every Friday to demand the Israeli prime minister’s resignation. “I’m not very pleased with my neighbour,” he said.

Even before October 7, Netanyahu was reeling from the outbreak of mass protests against his judicial reforms. Egged on by far-right members of his coalition, the former special forces soldier has been trying to curb the powers of Israel’s supreme court, a particularly controversial move given that he is facing corruption charges.

While the long-running corruption scandal has faded from public attention during the war in Gaza, Netanyahu received the unwelcome news this week that his corruption trial will resume tomorrow.

He is accused of accepting cigars and champagne worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to tweak tax laws, as well as securing favourable press coverage by clamping down on a newspaper’s competitor. He denies all charges.

At the protest yesterday, the families of those killed shouted “Shame” at the police blockade, and distributed T-shirts demanding the ouster of Netanyahu, who first came to power 27 years ago.

Since the attack, many Israelis have expected a reckoning for Netanyahu. But as the weeks turn to months, he appears to be building for another comeback.

Unlike Yoav Gallant, the defence minister, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi, the head of the IDF, and Ronen Bar, the director of domestic intelligence agency Shin Bet, Netanyahu has declined to say sorry for what happened on October 7.

Whenever he has been asked what went wrong – whether warnings from female officers were ignored, intelligence from foreign agencies was dismissed, or Israeli soldiers were diverted to protect settlers in the West Bank rather than securing the borders in the south – Netanyahu has said that a full accounting of the failures can only take place after the war.

He has already hinted at the position he would take in any inquiry, blaming Israeli intelligence services for failing to warn him about Hamas’s preparations, in a post on X that was deleted following a public backlash.

Eyal Santo, an urban planner, was a Likud voter at the last election but began drifting away from Netanyahu because of the prime minister’s judicial reforms. He said he had decided to attend the protests for the first time, accusing the prime minister of actively supporting Hamas to discredit the Palestinian cause.

“He is responsible. He is guilty. He’s been feeding the monster for the last 15 years,” Santo said.

Despite turning against the prime minister himself, Santo said he believed the war could be boosting Netanyahu’s image with the wider electorate.

“He’s better off now than on October 6. Back then, he was ignored by every international leader because of the judicial reforms.

“Now they’re queuing up to see him. President Biden ignored his request for a meeting at the White House. Now the US president comes to Jerusalem.”

The anti-Netanyahu protests began when Gadi Kedem, who lost six relatives to Hamas, wrote an open letter referencing Emile Zola’s denunciation of antisemitism in France during the Dreyfus affair.

The demonstrations were given further impetus by Yael Alon, a mother who explicitly called for Netanyahu to resign after losing her 22-year-old son, a platoon commander killed fighting in the kibbutzim. “Now is the time for him to go. He should have gone on October 8,” she said yesterday.

Alon’s story appears to have resonated with Israelis. She lost her father at age 8 during the Yom Kippur War, another attack that caught Israel’s politicians unaware and led to the ousting of the prime minister at the time, Golda Meir.

“The person who led us to this catastrophe cannot fix it,” she said.

Another protester was Martin Goldberg, a tour guide originally from Hendon, northwest London, who was with his three boxer dogs. He questioned whether soldiers had protected settlers in the West Bank, leaving the left-leaning residents of the southern kibbutzim defenceless.

He also criticised Netanyahu’s reluctance to meet those residents. “He didn’t say anything about the kibbutzim, he didn’t offer his condolences to the residents. Why? Because they don’t vote for him,” he said.