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This month, soldiers gathered around a campfire on the edge of a forest in central Israel to plan their next mission: to save a deeply divided country from itself.
Like many of the thousands of Israeli reservists called up to fight in Gaza, the soldiers went to war amid a sudden surge of national solidarity after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel.
But in recent weeks, as the military has withdrawn soldiers from Gaza and troops have returned home, they have realized that their country is not as it was after October 7, but rather as it was before, with divisive politics and I found myself torn apart by a clash of cultures.
Now, as these bitter divisions resurface, disillusioned reservists are at the forefront of a movement demanding a political reset, calling for unity and rejecting what many see as extreme polarization. There is.
“I first came out in December and was shocked to see that nothing had changed,” said David Sheres, a special forces commander and budding entrepreneur, as he left his base near Gaza. Ta.
One of the soldiers gathered around a campfire in the woods, Sheres is a founding member of Tikun 2024, a new bipartisan organization led by reservists that seeks to preserve the spirit of cooperation brought about by the war. It is.
“When you turn on the news and look at social media, it’s like October 7th never happened,” Sheres said. “Everyone needs to do some soul searching.”
Members of the small but fast-growing movement have raised controversial issues that have divided the country, including proposals to reform the justice system, talk of resettlement in Gaza, criticism of hostage families calling for a ceasefire, and budget proposals. He cited the government’s actions. It benefits far-right and ultra-Orthodox fringe groups at the expense of the national economy.
The Israeli military, whose military service is compulsory for most citizens, has always been the country’s great equalizer and unifier, at least for those drafted. Most Arab and ultra-Orthodox citizens do not serve. Tikun 2024 members say they want Israeli civilians to reflect the military’s brotherhood, with troops and tank crews divided between right-wing and left-wing, religious and secular Jews, Bedouin and Druze, and occupied groups. It is made up of settlers from the lower West Bank. and high-tech entrepreneurs from Tel Aviv.
The reservists who make up Tikun 2024’s leadership are a politically diverse group. (Tikun means fix or repair in Hebrew.) Rather than simply calling for immediate elections, which many Israelis would interpret as an attempt to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s main political parties instead called for the formation of an emergency unification. For now, he will form a government with Netanyahu and agree on an election schedule by the end of the year.
They believe that only a unity government can tackle the most difficult issues facing Israel’s future, including the fate of the occupied territories where Palestinians and much of the world envision a future Palestinian state. To tell.
The group was founded just a month ago, supported by crowdfunding, and quickly gained momentum. Lawmakers from across the political spectrum and representatives of competing sectors of Israeli society met with reservists around campfires, sometimes in the woods.
One night, Tikun 2024 leaders met with Sikma Bressler, a representative of the pre-war protest movement against the government’s hotly contested judicial reform plan.
The next night, they met at the same location with hardline MP Simcha Rosman, the architect of the judicial plan that had been put on hold at the start of the war.
Israel has a tradition of reservists returning from war leading influential change movements. One of the reserve captains, Moti Ashkenazy, started a lone protest movement a few months after the 1973 war. His movement grew and eventually forced then Prime Minister Golda Meir to resign in April 1974. Reservists used their status as patriots willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to play an important role in the protests following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s. and after the Second Lebanon War in 2006.
Thousands of Tikun 2024 supporters have already connected through WhatsApp groups, and a recent conference held in just four days attracted around 250 people from across the country to Jerusalem.
According to the soldiers, Tikun 2024 does not aim to become a political party. Nevertheless, some of its leaders have not ruled out running for office.
“We want new blood,” said Yitzhaki Glick, 38, a special forces commander and lawyer. He grew up in the settlement, was educated at a prominent religious Zionist institution, and was once involved in the development of new settlements. “We believe that the people working in the system today are not up to it.”
Glick, who now lives in Mazkeret Batiya in central Israel, said it was during his compulsory military service that he first met Israelis from different backgrounds. He said the dispute over judicial reform had led him to believe that history would repeat itself, and he feared that internal divisions would tear the country apart as it had in ancient times.
The group’s momentum is driven in part by a growing desire for national integration and fatigue with politics-as-usual. This trend is reflected in opinion polls showing a dramatic increase in support for former military commander Benny Gantz’s centrist party at the expense of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud.
Shoham Nabe, 26, a reservist and student who was called up on October 8, said: “We have to fight with our divisions. This is a war where we have no choice, both on the front and at home.” .
But not everyone is on board.
Critics have called Tikun 2024’s vision naive, and the group has come under fire from left and right. Leftists have accused the group of trying to put the anti-Prime Minister Netanyahu protests to sleep. Right-wingers called right-leaning members “useful idiots” of the left.
Some right-wing reservists and ultra-nationalist groups recently held a rally in Jerusalem, appealing to the government to see the war through to the decisive defeat of Hamas. Thousands of participants, mostly from the religious right, were in attendance, and the speakers took a hard-line stance, using fiery speeches to urge the government to reject an agreement to release the hostages and demand a price for territory from Palestinians in Gaza. asked to be forced to .
But even at that meeting, some soldiers returning from the front tried to keep their differences to a minimum.
“There is no right or left in the fighting,” said Eden Moshe Levin, 28, a supermarket worker in the southern city of Netivot, who was attacked on October 7.
“What’s the use of calling each other traitors?” he said.
Tour guide Rabbi Kreisman, 41, said he encountered the rally on his way home and said he was wearing a uniform and carrying an assault rifle. He said the explosion in Gaza killed 14 members of his unit, including both Jews and non-Jews.
“It’s the people who are fighting, not the politicians,” he said. He noted that all the fighters wanted to win, adding: “We want to make sure they don’t die in vain.”
Health officials in the Gaza Strip say more than 29,000 Palestinians have been killed after nearly five months of war, sparking international outrage. More than 260 Israeli soldiers have been killed since Israel launched its ground invasion in late October, in addition to those killed in a Hamas-led cross-border attack on October 1, according to Israeli officials. The 1,200 people included more than 300 soldiers. 7.
During the turbulent months leading up to October 7, reservists played a key role in anti-government protests under the umbrella of the grassroots group Comrades and Comrades. Thousands of members argued that the justice plan jeopardized the democracy they signed up to protect, and threatened to stop reporting to the reserves.
Many Israelis saw this refusal as crossing a line that should not be crossed, making Israel look weak in the eyes of its enemies.
However, the moment Israel was attacked, our brothers and sisters in arms called on all reservists to go to work and mobilized a huge civilian volunteer effort to assist Israelis affected by the war.
After months at the center of a political storm, the group is also calling for new elections and national unity.
“We have all learned a lesson,” said Eyal Nabe, 48, the organization’s leader. “We don’t want to return to a polarizing discourse that tramples on each other.” He said his group is also in dialogue with Israelis across the social and political spectrum, including the ultra-Orthodox community. Ta.
“At the end of the day, we’re all saying it’s time to act on the agreement,” he said.
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