Protest leader Bressler tells Jerusalem demo that Netanyahu seeks ‘eternal kingship,’ will lose election

Some 200 people attend an anti-government demonstration in Jerusalem’s Nayot Park, where protest leader Shikma Bressler, having spoken earlier in Tel Aviv, is among the speakers.

Bressler urges the crowd to ensure the upcoming elections are democratic, to minimize the damage Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government can yet do before polling day, and to make sure that the next government undoes the damage done by the outgoing coalition “from the root,” including by ending all funding to those who oppose what she says are Israel’s democratic and liberal norms.

She quotes at length from a social media post earlier today by Army Radio broadcaster Rino Zror, comparing Israel’s current situation to the periods before the destruction of the two Biblical temples. “Democratic Israel has its back to the sea,” she says, but “the majority want a democratic, liberal state” and “we will prevail.”

Bressler denounces the outgoing government as “the massacre coalition,” in reference to its failure to thwart the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion, and likewise brands Netanyahu “the massacre prime minister.” She accuses the prime minister and his government of installing a “religiously fanatical, tyrannical” infrastructure, culminating in this week’s legislative blitz, and says Netanyahu seeks “eternal kingship.”

“After a breach like this, there has to be correction,” she says, concluding, to applause: “There is an election to win, and a state to build anew.”