Silence of the lambs

In February 1974, Motti Ashkenazi, a recently released reservist who served in Sinai during the Yom Kippur War, parked himself outside of then-prime minister Golda Meir’s office in Jerusalem with a sign that read, “Grandma, your defense is a failure and 3,000 of your children are dead.”

His one-man protest against the failures leading up to, and during, the Yom Kippur War swelled into a mass movement, one that caused the government to resign a few months

later and led in 1977 to the end of the Labor Party’s historic ironclad grip on power.

Today is not 1974, and the political crisis that has paralyzed the country for the last year can in no way in the world be compared to the Yom Kippur War. One was a military failure that led to thousands of deaths and placed the country on the brink of defeat, the other is a political crisis that has caused the country’s political instability and wasted billions of shekels. There is no comparison.

Yet, one thing striking about the current political crisis is that it did not trigger any mass public movement. Sure, there were sporadic rallies for and against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or for and against the state attorney and the legal establishment, but the most they attracted were a few thousand people with a partisan agenda.

There was no effort to rally tens of thousands of people into Rabin Square in Tel Aviv demanding the parties end the logjam and figure out a way, for the collective good, to do the most basic thing a government must do for its people: govern.

Would it make a difference, New Right leader Ayelet Shaked was asked at the Jerusalem Post Diplomatic Conference last month, if masses