Hundreds protest in Tel Aviv against ‘government of debacle and disaster’

About 1,000 people rally at Tel Aviv’s Habima Sqaure against the government’s bid to codify the Haredi exemption from military service and its refusal to form a state commission of inquiry into failures surrounding the Hamas-led onslaught of October 7, 2023.

The rally is organized by the Movement for Quality Government, which has petitioned the High Court to compel the government to draft ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students and form a state commission of inquiry.

Former minister Izhar Shay, whose son Yaron was killed fending off the onslaught at Kibbutz Kerem Shalom, tells protesters that the “band of spineless suck-ups” in the government won’t be able to avoid an investigation for long.

“One day, when a state commission of inquiry is established,” he vows, “the ministers of the government of debacle and disaster will have to give a detailed explanation, under oath,” for their purported failure to keep tabs on the security of Israel’s failure ahead of the onslaught, says Shay.

He says he vowed at his son’s funeral “that I would do everything… to uncover the truth.”

“I wasn’t looking for revenge, and I’m not looking for revenge today, either,” says Shay. “But I did look for justice.”

Fellow former minister Orna Barbivai, who as the IDF’s first female general led the military’s Personnel Directorate, accuses “the government of crooks” of putting ultra-Orthodox interests over those of Israelis who serve in the army.

“The duty to obey the law applies only to us, who work and pay taxes and serve in the IDF,” she says. “In the crook government’s virtual reality, the ongoing erosion of people who serve in the IDF is less important than… those who would die and not draft,” she says.

Barbivai also accuses Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of caving to US President Donald Trump’s declaration of a Lebanon ceasefire even as “residents of the north live under non-stop fire from Hezbollah.”

Moreover, she claims the government is failing to support the IDF as it “is forced to deal with Jewish terrorism every day” in the West Bank.

The West Bank violence is “un-Jewish and inhumane” and is carried out by “organized, funded gangs that harm our legitimacy to act” against enemies, says Barbivai.

She does not mention Palestinians in this section of her speech, and her comments come despite multiple instances of settler violence perpetrated either by active-duty reservists or with the cooperation of soldiers in the field.