In
the center of the front line of the marchers who filled the width of King George
Street in downtown Jerusalem, two young men stretched a banner between them
that read, “Starvation is a war crime.” Behind them, in the stifling
night heat, came the drummers and the megaphone-bearers who provided lyrics
for the drums’ thundering:

Security is not achieved
On the corpses of children!

The
crowd chanted responsively. Another call followed: No more abandonment!

This
referred to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu government’s abandoning of
Israeli hostages in Hamas tunnels. The marchers, carrying pictures of hostages
and of Gazan children, and Israeli flags and yellow flags that stand for bringing
hostages home, poured into Paris Square, near Netanyahu’s house, on a recent
Saturday night.

Then
speeches began. They focused on the hostages and the need for a ceasefire deal
with Hamas that would free all of them immediately. One speaker did include
“hunger” in her words, and said, “Let us end this evil war. Let
us feed the children.” Otherwise, I did not hear starvation of Palestinian
civilians mentioned from the stage. The absence was stark, at a time when
reports of escalating malnutrition in Gaza have filled media outside Israel and
those parts
of the Israeli media willing to report
on it.

Standing
on the square, I agreed with all that was said about the hostages, the anguish
of their families, and the government that seems more interested in endless war
than in its duty to free them. But I was also dismayed. The war that began with
Hamas’s unthinkably cruel attack on Israel has morphed into inconceivable
brutality ordered by our government. And I was struck by the dissonance between
the march and the rally that followed, between the voices from the crowd
demanding to stop that horror and the speeches that largely avoided talking
about it.  

Jerusalem
is a right-leaning city, and rallying for the hostages is a weekly ritual. This
time, I’d estimate, perhaps 2,000 people came out.

Two
nights earlier, I’d headed to Tel Aviv for a one-off demonstration, headlined
explicitly as “End the War, Bring Everyone Home.” The stress on
stopping the war, and the advertised
participation of soldiers’ parents, marked a shift in
mainstream protests from the hostages alone. Implicitly, “everyone”
included Israeli troops. The price of the war in the deaths of Israeli
soldiers, in long and traumatic reserve duty for many Israeli citizens, and in
the strain on the families of those in combat is growing as a political issue.

Near
sunset, protesters flooded a boulevard and marched past the Defense Ministry to
the wide square in front of Habima Theater, a spot synonymous with protest
against the Netanyahu government. Inside the square, the crowd was so dense I could barely move. Drone
photos show the overflow spilling out into surrounding streets. Organizers
estimated the numbers at 50,000 to nearly 100,000—or close to 1 percent of
the country’s population. It may have been the largest protest since the
outpouring of rage last September after six kidnapped Israelis were
murdered in Gaza while Netanyahu evaded a hostage
deal.

The
dissonance I would see in Jerusalem was here on a larger scale: Protesters held
signs calling for a hostage deal and to end starvation, and simply, in English,
to “End This F*cking War.” On the big screen set up on the square, we
saw the mother of a hostage speak, and the father of soldier who’d been
critically wounded three weeks earlier. “We raised a wonderful generation.
Why are we killing them, wounding them, traumatizing them for years, and pushing
them to suicide? For what? For what?” he asked.

“The
state has lost the trust of the mothers,” said the mother of an officer
serving in Gaza. “We have no more children to sacrifice.”

All
their reasons for ending the war were true. But I waited for outrage about Palestinian
hunger, and did not hear it.

The
Tel Aviv rally was organized by retired General Noam
Tibon, working with parents of fallen soldiers. He
was responding, he told me, to “soldiers dying in Gaza for political
reasons,” to the danger to the remaining hostages, and to “Israel’s international isolation.” Tibon weighed each word; he
stopped short rather than describe the reason for that isolation.

I
asked why famine had not been mentioned in the speeches. “Look, many
people come to the demonstration,” he said. “The goal is to end the
war, for Israel’s own good. I try to be practical. Ending the war will also
help people in Gaza.” The voices of the bereaved parents “changed the
whole Israeli discourse,” he said.

In
Jerusalem, the weekly rallies are put together by Sharing Our Preserved Home, a
group born before the war in the protests against the Netanyahu government’s
autocratic constitutional coup. Eyal Gur, a leading activist, told me that the
march reflects the political diversity in the city. At the rally, “the stage is given to the
hostage issue—the families and the
whole system of support around them. And their choice is to be more moderate.”

In
other words, they appeared to imply, the most public part of the protest—the
announced messages, the speeches likely to be quoted in the media—must seek
the widest consensus, and that requires focusing on the suffering and death of
Israelis.

In
a country at war, this is disturbing—but not surprising. Look back to America
in the Vietnam era: Opposition to the draft was the engine of protest. Pete
Seeger sang “Bring Them Home” about U.S. soldiers. Walter Cronkite’s
famous 1968
broadcast, often credited
with shifting the public consensus, focused on the war being unwinnable, not on
Vietnamese civilians killed by American bombs.

This
is a classic activists’ dilemma. Politics, I believe, is most of all about
getting things done. What needs to be accomplished is ending the war, which
will indeed benefit Gazans. I cannot ignore the tactical claim that focusing on
what the war is doing to Israel is the best way to mobilize enough Israelis to
force the government’s hand. Addressing
Gaza’s starvation might turn off people who would otherwise come out to
protest. Speaking of Israeli war crimes certainly could do that.

Yet
muteness in the face of what is happening in Gaza is unbearable. Another price
of war is the moral callousness it produces. To accept silence about the
dehumanization of Palestinians adds to that price.

There
have been smaller protests directly addressing the famine in Gaza, organized by
Standing Together, a movement of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis. Alon-Lee
Green, the group’s co-director, told me that the problem with the mainstream
demonstrations is that they’ve stuck with the same messages as at the start of
the war.

“The
most basic question in politics is whether you assimilate into the
consensus” or lead it, Green said. For that reason, Standing Together also
took part in the major Tel Aviv demonstration and handed out pictures of Gazan
children and signs against starvation.

The
mainstream demonstrations are necessary; I can only hope that they escalate. Yet
the protest within the protest is essential.

At
the end of the rally in Jerusalem, an older man at the back of the crowd
shouted: “The hostages are not the whole story! They are part of the
story, not all of it!” He
spoke for me as well, and for many of us.