Organizers in Haifa handed out flyers at a Saturday night protest last month asking attendees which form of civil disobedience they are willing to participate in. Options available to those signing up included participating in sit-ins, striking from work, and refusing to attend and send children to school.
Civil disobedience is a form of nonviolent protest characterized by a refusal to comply with the demands of authorities. It can include a refusal to pay taxes, strikes, refusing to draft to the military.
Famous examples of civil disobedience include Rosa Parks’s 1955 refusal to vacate her bus seat for a white person and Mahatma Gandhi’s almost month-long Salt March protesting the British salt monopoly in 1930.
Recent calls for civil disobedience have sparked controversy in Israel as some protest leaders have called to increase the intensity and change the format of the rallies and protests that have defined objection to the judicial reform, seen by opponents as the destruction of democracy, and which have more recently defined the movement to bring back the hostages held by Hamas since October 7.
Protesters have asserted that continuing to participate in rallies and occasional big protests is not creating sufficient pressure to sway government policy, bring about a hostage deal, and instigate elections.
It is clear that “if we want to bring back the hostages and get rid of the government, we need to move to a new phase,” said Joseph Dishon.
Dishon, an organizer in Haifa who has been involved in protests since accusations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked objections to his leadership in 2017, in some ways seems like an unlikely leader of civil disobedience.
Dishon, who was a combat officer in the IDF’s paratroopers, did reserve duty for many years and served in all of Israel’s wars from the Six Day War and on until his retirement from reserve duty at age 45. He also retired from the government research organization Israel Oceanographic and Limnological Research, where he worked as VP of finance.
For Dishon, however, the move from IDF officer and civilian to civil disobedience seems only natural given the situation in which the country finds itself: embroiled in a war, with 100 civilians still held hostage, and led by a government that has not regained a public mandate through elections after the horrific Hamas attack on October 7 that occurred on its watch.
“I grew up in The Scouts movement; I studied at the Reali school in Haifa. I come from a relatively stately and conformist background, but [when I was growing up] I think that all of our education was much less conformist,” Dishon explained.
Today, he says, students receive a much more orthodox education and often receive the message that what is most important is “nationalism over all else.”
“There is no critical thinking,” said Dishon, adding that this only became worse after October 7, and the messaging that came with it asserting “together we will win,” which Dishon said was a slogan meant to save the government and its leaders.
“It turned out that Am Yisrael (the Jewish people) more or less bought into these slogans,” said Dishon, adding that while the war continued, at times more in appearance than in intensity of military action, the government was able to suppress protest while still advancing the judicial reform and failing to bring home the hostages.
Dishon said it is “clear that if we want to bring back the hostages and get rid of the government, we need to move to a new phase,” explaining that the government is now unbothered by large rallies and Saturday night protests.
'Now is the time'
Now is the time “to find the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of determined people who will be prepared to sit on the asphalt,” he added, offering the Shift 101 hostage mothers protest, where participants sit in the road in silent protest in front of various government buildings, as an example.
Dishon was one of the organizers who handed out the flyers in Haifa and signed people up for civil disobedience, working to recruit more people to the move he sees as necessary to save the future of the state.
“The bottom line is that Am Yisrael must understand that the government is leading it to disaster and to a dead end,” he explained. “I don’t like to use harsh language, but what I would define as a gang, only interested in messianic ideology on the one hand or criminals on the other, has taken over the State of Israel.”
There has been a significant response from protesters expressing a willingness to participate, Dishon said, explaining that there was “serious interest” in organizing for civil disobedience.
Efforts to mobilize protesters to civil disobedience are ongoing and continuing on social media, he added.
As far as he knows, tens of thousands have joined the effort, and the time for significant action is “ripening,” he added.
Various types of civil disobedience
DISHON EXPLAINED that signing people up at the protest and offering them the various options of types of civil disobedience was a preparation more than it was a call for immediate action. The flyers were handed out, and people were registered to help organizers locate “determined people” – those willing to join civil disobedience efforts when the time comes, Dishon clarified.
“Everything is a process,” Dishon explained. “First of all, [the flyers were] to present an image, vision, or destination to [potential participants] of what the day of reckoning looks like,” said Dishon, referring to the day when organizers will mobilize widespread acts of civil disobedience.
This mass action will need to develop, he explained, saying it will start with tens of thousands sitting in front of centers of governance in Jerusalem, refusing to leave for weeks, and grow as hundreds of thousands join them. This kind of action would hopefully lead to strikes and education system shutdowns nationwide, Dishon added.
Dishon initially joined the protest movement when it became clear to him that Netanyahu “is leading us to a bad place” and because he had become aware of a process in which Israel had shown more and more fascist tendencies.
Early in October of 2023, when it became clear to him that healing in Israeli society must include the return of the hostages and elections, he began leading a protest in Haifa’s Kikar Sefer that called for elections and the return of the hostages. The circle was filled with posters of the hostages, and people have been standing in protest in the circle in shifts ever since.
“The government must leave; we must bring back the hostages – that is a mission of top priority if we want Israeli society to continue to live as a society that is normal and sane,” he said.
Dishon said he expects anyone concerned about the future of the country and of their children or grandchildren to take to the streets. “ I am pretty surprised that millions of citizens of Israel are not going out [in protest].”
“That is probably human nature,” he rationalized, saying most people are “used to sitting on the fence and waiting for others to do the work.”
“So we will do the work,” he added.