Alon-Lee Green, co-founder of the Palestinian-Jewish activist group Standing Together, attempted to organize a protest against his country’s war against Iran on Thursday. It was the second attempt, he said, after police broke up the first.
They had anticipated official objections to the protest on public safety grounds and reserved space in an underground theater that could function as a shelter. It wasn’t ideal, he said, but in times like these, it was better than nothing.
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The police and right-wing protesters were waiting.
“They said they came to watch us,” Green said of the police presence. He assumed that the protesters had only come to mock him. “(The police) checked our identification and said they were there to make sure we didn’t say anything that wasn’t allowed. It was clear they were there to intimidate us,” he said. “There’s nothing new about it. It’s ongoing.”
Much of Israeli society has supported the war with Iran in a similar way to the support given to the genocidal war in Gaza following the October 7 attack on southern Israel, Green said.
A poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) earlier this month suggested overwhelming support for the war, with 93 percent of Jewish respondents backing the attack on Iran, an enemy that the Israeli public has been told for years was intent on destroying.
“It’s strange,” Green said from Tel Aviv, pointing out the paradoxes of an opposition supporting a war its political opponents had started. Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, for example, has said he will no longer support no-confidence motions against the government in the midst of a “just war.”
“Apart from the Palestinian parties, the entire opposition is united behind the war,” Green said. “On the one hand, they claim that they are for war, but against (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu. At the same time, (they do not) recognize that it is the war that helps support Netanyahu. It is a complete failure of politics.”
Netanyahu on Thursday framed the war in characteristically momentous terms, telling a news conference that the conflict against Iran would be “recorded in the annals of Israel,” a conflict he said was being fought for “future generations” and even for “the future of humanity.”
a thirst for war
Rallying around the flag in the early days of any war is to be expected, Chatham House’s Yossi Mekelberg told Al Jazeera, even if what many in Israel have come to think about the oppressive and threatening nature of the Iranian regime made it easier.
“In many ways it is the psychology of war,” he said. “It helps that all of Israel’s political parties are offering uncritical support for a war against a country that has been arming Hezbollah (in Lebanon), the Houthis in Yemen and has been calling for the death of Israel for decades. That is something people can understand,” he said, adding that details about the negotiations, sanctions and the effectiveness of the nuclear deal from which the United States withdrew in 2018 were lost in the rush to war.
A critical examination of the war, or any clear understanding of its end, has been largely absent from public discussions that prefer to focus on the long-standing reasons for its cause, analysts said.
“There is a huge gap between how this war is portrayed within Israel and elsewhere,” London-based Israeli academic and media analyst Ayala Panievsky told Al Jazeera. “There is little to no criticism of the war in the mainstream Israeli media, and after October 7, it has become even easier to convince Israelis that if they don’t attack first, someone else will.”
For Panievsky, military force had come to be seen as the only answer to the Israeli public’s concern for security, and what she described as Netanyahu’s takeover of the media fueled the process, “and while he and his government have not been popular for years, this current war unfortunately is.”
“The term ‘regime change’ also doesn’t trigger the same kind of trauma and fear that it does for Americans or Britons,” he said of the disasters that have characterized previous Western attempts at regime change in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan.
“People are not interested in reflection or analysis,” Mekelberg said.
“Iran is (perceived as) the aggressor, always has been, so this can make even an attack look like self-defense,” he said, adding that the killings of thousands of people in Iran in January had added to the perception within Israel of a “heroic” war, partly aimed at supporting the Iranian opposition.
In Tel Aviv, Green wasn’t so sure. While he has no love for the government in Tehran, neither he nor other members of Standing Together felt that going to war against Iran was the best way to free their people. Nor was he convinced that the Israeli public’s support for a war with no clear end was a fact.
“They told us in June that they had completely destroyed Iran’s missiles and their ability to attack us, but here we are,” he said of the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June 2025. “They said last year that they had destroyed Hezbollah, but yesterday they launched more than 200 rockets at Israel.
“People are starting to question and criticize,” he said, “and I think that’s going to increase.”
