Thousands of people gathered in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square Aug. 11 to protest against the controversial Nationality Law.

“It’s a good thing [Zionist Camp leader] Avi Gabbay didn’t show up here,” said one participant at the rally on condition of anonymity. “That’s all he needs, for [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu to spread a photo of the Zionist Camp leader against the backdrop of a Palestinian flag.” At the same time, Gabbay was telling Hadashot News that he had stayed away from the protest because its organizers, the Balad Party and the Arab Joint List (the alliance Balad is part of), “support the right of return” of Palestinian refugees and do not believe in a Jewish state. His colleague and leader of the parliamentary opposition, Tzipi Livni, said she sat out the event because some members of the Joint List do not share her view of the State of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. The vast majority — 22 out of 24 — of the Zionist Camp’s Knesset faction, the biggest parliamentary opposition group, as well as members of the second-largest opposition party, Yesh Atid, stayed home that night.

“I am most concerned by my fellow travelers who are afraid that standing up proudly against the incitement campaign [by the political right] could hurt them publicly or politically,” said Knesset member Mickey Rosenthal of the Labor Party, one of the two factions comprising the Zionist Camp. Rosenthal was standing in Rabin Square alongside Zouheir Bahloul, until recently a fellow party lawmaker who quit over the Nationality Law, and Knesset members of the left-wing Meretz Party and the Joint List. “People make choices according to various considerations,” Rosenthal said. “I am totally at peace with mine. My conscience is clean. If I have to pay a political price, I will.”

Brig. Gen. (Res.) Ami Ayalon, one-time head of the Shin Bet and a former Labor Party Knesset member, was harshly critical of his defense establishment colleagues for coming out to support a protest rally by the Druze minority Aug. 4, but staying away from the one organized by representatives of Israel’s 21% Arab population. “Those of us who don’t come are in effect joining Netanyahu and selling out the democratic value of equality for a pittance,” Ayalon wrote in a Facebook post. “Obviously, I will not agree with everything that is said on the podium and will not identify with the flags that may be raised there. I am joining the demonstration not in support of its organizers and identification with all its messages, but because of my belief that there is no Zionism without democracy and there is no democracy without equality for all.”