On May 26, 2026, the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program (JKISP) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law hosted a panel titled "Cross-Sectoral Mobilization in Defense of Democracy," part of a series on global democratic resistance organized in collaboration with the Ash Center for Democratic Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School; the Cornell Center on Global Democracy; Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania; the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame; the Democratic Futures Project at the University of Virginia; and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Amichai Magen, Director of JKISP, moderated alongside Ben Yoel, an incoming postdoctoral fellow at CDDRL for the 2026-27 academic year. They were joined by three founders of Israel's Protest Headquarters, the coordinating body behind the 2023 movement against the government's judicial overhaul: Yossi Kucik, former Director-General of Israel's Prime Minister's Office; Orni Petruschka, a former fighter pilot turned tech entrepreneur; and Advocate Dina Zilber, former Deputy Attorney General of Israel. Zilber said the crisis represented a shift “from policy conflict to regime conflict.” The government's plan would have let politicians pick judges and override Supreme Court rulings, among other changes, and Zilber said that went well beyond a normal reform. Kucik added that the Headquarters decided early on that its founders would act as enablers, not leaders. There were two hundred separate protest groups with their own methods and politics, he said, and no one person could have run all of them. The group adopted the Israeli flag and national anthem as symbols. They branded the government's plan a "judicial coup," and Kucik said they decided early on to stay nonviolent and to fight specific policies rather than try to topple the government outright.

Petruschka said funding came in approximately equal thirds from crowdfunding, Israeli philanthropists, and the Jewish diaspora. Zilber credited a volunteer network of 150 legal academics for writing up plain-language explanations of each proposed law as it came out, which provided “a nationwide civics lesson.” Petruschka said many protests around the world would benefit from the headquarters model. One concern for protest movements worldwide, according to Zilber, is the need to turn civic energy into political power, since voters choose parties, not protests. They also need a governing plan ready for the day after they win; Zilber pointed to Poland as a case where that did not occur. Kucik expressed concern that the Headquarters’s refraining from adopting an explicit goal to topple the government may have cost momentum. However, he noted the protests’ success; for example, an attempt to fire the defense minister over Haredi military conscription brought around a million people into the streets within minutes and pushed coalition partners towards near-defection, leading Netanyahu to draw back on his reforms. Petruschka said the movement's momentum was cut short by October 7th, redirected toward wartime relief, and has since folded into the campaign for Israel's coming elections.