From our attempt to check the atmosphere among reservists, it appears to the best of our understanding that there is indeed a certain feeling of burnout, but it still does not turn into a protest. In the First Lebanon War, one of the first signs of significant attrition of the forces was the song "A plane came down to us… and we will return in a coffin", which expressed anger at the second Likud government's war of choice. It was bitterness at the time, which did not have a significant political expression but rather a fleeting anger, and it did not lead to political change. What was is what remained during the war, and after it. Nine years before the First Lebanon War, there was a protest by one man, Moti Ashkenazi, but it had the effect of a fundamental change. This protest threw out the political establishment of the country's founders and raised the establishment that exists to this very day. In this sense, there has only been one founding protest so far, in 1973. The protest of 1982 was, as mentioned above, more folklore than culture, mainly because the corrupt political establishment that replaced the discarded socialists, managed to hide well what is now seen as a kind of military coup perpetrated by Rafael Eitan and Ariel Sharon. Menachem Begin's poignant words that touch the heart that all fighting will stop when the IDF reaches the 40th kilometer is still remembered, while Sharon and Eitan's IDF is racing towards Beirut. Even Lt. Col. Eli Geva, who asked to be relieved of command of his brigade, did not attract many supporters to him.

The current atmosphere among IDF soldiers, in our opinion, is more similar to the Ashkenazi protest than to the 1982 protest. It is similar to the 1973 protest in the sense that if it were to develop, the background for its occurrence would be a deep social crisis. In 1973 it was the Mizrahim protest that ended the Ashkenazi racial attack against it – which was represented by the socialist government And also on October 7, the war was imposed on Israel when it is in the midst of a deep sectarian social crisis, which Benjamin Netanyahu's government has sharpened since 1996 in order to maintain its long-term rule.

But this is where the similarity ends between the 1973 protest and the budding atmosphere of the 2023 protest. The difference is that now Israeli society is very aware of the sectarian tension, and it does not hide it as before, especially it does not hide its reality from itself. Because of this, the soldiers on the front are also very aware of the Israeli social explosive charge, and they are aware that if a protest against the war breaks out, it could in the same breath unravel the conscious, good ties and the positive energy that East and West have created in the military units and on the battlefields since October 7. Yes, the war united East and West, in stark contrast to the attempts of the Likud governments since 1996 to sharpen the rift.

 In order not to unravel this new understanding, we estimate that hundreds of thousands of reservists will prevent their anger over the course of the war from turning into a deep protest. And so that a new protest does not break out that will renew the rift between East and West, In our estimation, the soldiers at the front will wait until the end of the war and then set out decisively to change the public structure of Israel. In our estimation, they will reduce party politics and increase the presence of the public in Israeli politics. No more the party-political establishment of 1973, and not that of 2023.

Meir Gurno and Mati Cohen