The face of Israel’s protests is a particle physicist

Shikma Bressler, a mother of five who says her passion is life in the lab, has emerged as a symbol of the struggle against the government’s divisive judicial overhaul.

The particle physicist was sitting at a café in Tel Aviv when a young server rushed over, gushing at her in admiration. An older couple, a husband and wife, at the next table looked over at her with tears in their eyes.

“You are our hope,” the wife said. Later, the physicist stopped to chat with the couple on her way out, and hugged the woman.

“She’s an honest, brave and genuine leader,” said the husband, Natan Sitner, a retiree. “She didn’t come to this out of personal interest,” he added. “When she gets up onstage, everyone listens and believes what she says.”

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For years, the physicist, Shikma Bressler, devoted herself to the lab she runs at a science institute near Tel Aviv, a job she describes as her passion, and to the raising of her five daughters in a small village in northern Israel, staying far away from politics.

But she has also become the face of the protests that have rocked Israel for months, marching on the streets of Tel Aviv on Saturday nights, exhorting crowds of protesters with speeches echoing with revolutionary ardour and amplifying her message in a steady stream of social media posts. She was arrested, briefly, in March after she encouraged protesters to block a highway.

Bressler sealed her status as a symbol of the protest movement last month when she led a milelong column of demonstrators on a multiday march to the hills of Jerusalem from coastal Tel Aviv. It evoked a biblical pilgrimage, and they picked up tens of thousands of supporters during the journey.

The march, Bressler said, was “almost a spiritual experience,” attracting Israelis angered by the government’s contentious plans to reduce the influence of the Supreme Court, a move that prompted perhaps the deepest internal crisis since the foundation of the state 75 years ago. People along the way contributed huge quantities of food for the marchers. Somebody noticed that one of Bressler’s shoes was torn and asked for her shoe size. She soon had seven pairs to choose from.

“It’s rare that you recognise you are in a real-time historical moment,” Bressler said during an interview in the café, reflecting on the events of the past few months. “It’s amazing to be living it as it happens and to be taking on some responsibility for this story.”

After the march from Tel Aviv, many of the demonstrators camped out near parliament until lawmakers passed the first law last week in a package of legislation intended to rein in the Supreme Court and give more power to the government.

While the far-right and religiously conservative governing coalition that campaigned for the changes argues that they are a much-needed move to bolster the authority of elected governments, critics such as Bressler see them as an effort to erode Israel’s democracy and worry that they could lead to a dictatorship.

“We are at a historical crossroads,” Bressler said in the interview, which was conducted a few days after the vote. “From here, there is no going back; we can only take one of two ways forward,” she added.

“We can either fall into a very dark, extreme, racist place where the Israel that we know, in all its social and economic aspects, will be destroyed,” she said, touching on another issue that has struck a nerve with liberal Israelis — the presence of ultranationalist ministers in the government with a history of anti-Arab incitement and homophobia. “Or we can build a new stronger, better democracy for the good of all the people.”

Bressler is a professor and runs a lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv. She is an active member of an international team experimenting with particle detectors at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva — an effort, she said, to understand “the other 95% of the universe beyond what we already know.”

She said she never planned to become a leader of the protests, and had no political ambitions. Bressler said she first became concerned about where Israel was headed in March 2020, when Benjamin Netanyahu, then the prime minister, as he is now, ordered a shutdown of the courts at the start of a coronavirus-related lockdown. Netanyahu cited health concerns for
the move, but it also postponed the opening of his corruption trial, angering many Israelis.

Bressler said she and two of her three brothers decided they had to do something.

They devised a plan to lead a convoy of cars driving to parliament in Jerusalem, and made video clips calling on people to join them. Bressler’s clip circulated widely online, and scores of people turned up with their cars for the protest.

Encouraged by their success, Bressler and her siblings founded a group called Black Flags, one of the early anti-Netanyahu protest groups, and became actively involved in later protests that sought to oust the prime minister.

During the subsequent period when Netanyahu was out of office, from June 2021 until the end of 2022, Bressler settled back into her routine at the lab and at home — her eldest daughter is now 17; the youngest, age 5, is still in kindergarten.

But she returned to the streets for a huge protest in Tel Aviv on Jan 14, days after the justice minister, Yariv Levin, introduced his plan to overhaul the country’s judiciary.

The next Saturday night, the coordinating committee for a protest in Tel Aviv was seeking a presenter to go onstage and, after failing to recruit an actor or prominent journalist in time, decided to ask Bressler.

“Things evolved from week to week. It evolved until she became the face of the struggle,” Nadav Galon, a spokesperson for the committee, said of Bressler.

She stays on message in her speeches and frequent appearances in the Israeli news media, using plain language to convey what she calls the urgent mission to “save the country.”

Today, Bressler is not associated with any particular protest group.

The anti-government protest camp embraces a broad section of mainstream Israelis who want to preserve a more pluralist and liberal society. It has no hierarchical or formal leadership; a highly organised coordinating committee is made up mostly of volunteers. Financing comes from contributions from Israel’s business and tech communities and from crowdfunding.

A self-described political centrist, Bressler acknowledges that the protest movement cannot solve all of Israel’s problems.