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After the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, Israel saw huge protests. Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets in Tel Aviv, calling for the return of hostages and an end to the war in Gaza. With a ceasefire now in place, NPR's Lauren Frayer reports on what's next for those protesters.
ORLY ESHET: Something yellow with the T-shirts.
LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE: Orly Eshet sits in a tent in what's been known for two years as Hostage Square. She's got a stack of bring-them-home T-shirts and keychains, which she's thinking of donating to a homeless shelter now.
ESHET: It's leftovers, and I don't know what they're going to do with it.
FRAYER: It's a problem she says she dreamed of having when Israelis were in Gaza captivity. Now, with all the living hostages out, this square is mostly deserted.
I remember not being able to move in this square. It was so packed with demonstrators. It's still ringed by Israeli flags and photographs of those who were held in Gaza. There's some teenagers who look like they're taking a shortcut on the way home from school. But other than them, I'm 1 of 3 people. I actually never saw the pavement here before. There's a picture of a dove with an olive branch in its beak spray-painted on the ground.
Israel's wartime protesters were mostly calling for the hostages' return. There was some overlap with those protesting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They accused him of authoritarian tendencies and corruption. Since the ceasefire, there are still weekend rallies, and they've been dominated by the anti-Netanyahu crowd...
UNIDENTIFIED CROWD: (Singing in non-English language).
FRAYER: ...Calling for an inquiry into why Israel was left vulnerable on October 7, 2023. But off to the side, there's a barely 5-foot tall retiree with a megaphone...
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: (Speaking Hebrew).
FRAYER: ...Shouting about Palestinian suffering.
RUTTI ANTOINETTE LEVI: There are thousands of Palestinians kidnapped from Gaza.
FRAYER: Rutti Antoinette Levi (ph) says she's angry Israel has jailed thousands of Palestinians over the past two years, angry it hasn't allowed more humanitarian aid into Gaza, resulting in what the U.N. calls starvation. And Levi uses the word genocide to describe what she believes Israel committed in Gaza. It's a word she says she understands full well.
LEVI: My mother is a survivor from the Holocaust, and I think it's our duty to help everyone to survive. We can't agree that the security of the Jews will be obtained by killing all the Palestinians.
FRAYER: As we chat, a man comes up and yells a profanity at Levi, who's carrying a sign that says, from the river to the sea, everybody must be free. And I asked her how many of her countrymen agree with her.
LEVI: Oh, I don't know. Maybe a hundred, maybe 200, maybe 300.
FRAYER: In the whole country?
LEVI: In the whole country, I think.
FRAYER: In a September poll just before the ceasefire, a little over 2% of Jewish Israeli respondents said the main reason to end the war was to cease harming Gazans. The largest proportion of both Jewish and Arab respondents said the safety of hostages was their main concern. I put those figures to another protester here, Hamutal Tsamir (ph), who's a Hebrew literature professor.
HAMUTAL TSAMIR: There is a very, very profound dehumanization of Palestinian people in Israeli society.
FRAYER: And she believes the reason for that is...
TSAMIR: The occupation. Basically, the occupation.
FRAYER: For decades, since 1967, really, she says, the Israeli left has struggled with the moral question of occupying the Palestinian territories. But lots of people just got used to it, she says, and have since turned inward, focusing on domestic stuff, the rise of Netanyahu and the Israeli far-right and, more recently, their own October 7 trauma. A small group of protesters are shifting gears, though, from Hostage Square to the West Bank, where...
NOGA BARON: Terrorism is rising. And we want to keep Palestinians safe.
FRAYER: That's Noga Baron, an Israeli software designer. When she says terrorism, she's talking about Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, who've been attacking Palestinians in record numbers, especially during the olive harvest, which is right now.
BARON: (Non-English language spoken).
FRAYER: So Baron and hundreds of other volunteers are boarding buses to a Palestinian olive farm to act as human shields.
BARON: An act of standing with them. I hope that when Jewish Israelis are there, then Palestinians are less - there's less of a chance that they will be attacked.
FRAYER: With her is Roni Tamari (ph), an Israeli American doctor visiting from New York.
RONI TAMARI: Nothing is over. The disaster in Gaza is not over, and certainly what's happening in the West Bank has escalated.
FRAYER: The huge protests may have ended, but the conflicts that triggered them, she says, are far from over.
Lauren Frayer, NPR News, Tel Aviv.
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