The quiet, angry protest of women in white

I joined the Jerusalem protest of women, mothers, supporting the mothers of hostages. It was nice. Did it have any effect?

Last week I went to the women-in-white protest demanding that the government make a deal to return the hostages.

Hundreds of women, including my friend Rabbi Haviva Ner-David, and a few men, sat on the street in front of coalition MK Nir Barkat, sometimes singing, sometimes in silence

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We have since been learning the extent to which this government has taken measures to ensure that there WILL NOT BE a hostage deal or a cease fire any time soon, possibly not ever.

The Bibi government, since DAY 1 of this awful war, has been doing everything to get public opinion and his coalition partners to OPPOSE a deal. Including many illegal things and certainly immoral things.

Yes, he has been engaging in illegal acts to make sure that there will be NO ceasefire and NO hostage deal. It's absolutely mind-blowing. And infuriating.

Several members of the prime minister’s office have been arrested so far for falsifying documents and sharing military secrets with the foreign press. So far Bibi is claiming he didn't know, saving his seat while throwing under the bus those closest to him.

Of course saying he didn't know what was going on in his office would make him incompetent. It's interesting that he's willing to admit this kind of incompetence -- again, if it saves his seat. We already know about his incompetence because, well, here we are. Daily rockets, a never-ending war, endless deaths on all sides of the conflict, multiple war fronts, and an economy that is falling apart. Incompetence is an understatement. So he's admitting incompetence b/c his only other option is to admit to acts that will land him in jail for the rest of his life.

What's worse, Bibi’s seat-saving crookedness and systematic neglect of his country is enabled by an utterly corrupt coalition whose members are among the worst human beings on the planet right now. And that’s saying a lot. They are MKs and ministers who grab budgets for themselves at the expense of everyone else, MKs who promote running away from army service at all cost, MKs actively calling for leaving the hostages behind, MKs working to attack or imprison protesters and hostage families, MKs calling to dismantle democracy and who attack systems of democracy and call their protectors “anarchists”, and the most radical ones calling for a complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

Yeah, that's the government.

So I went to this protest a few times. The police were there, threatening arrests at some point. The organizers negotiated with the police and in the end only a few people were arrested and there were no ugly scenes.

That's the good news. The bad news is that nothing has changed. The war still rages, people are dying, and the hostages are still there. So, there's that.

I’m actively seeking out signs of hope and optimism. If you have any, please share.

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