Headline of Yediot the day after Yom Kippur, speaking of Dizengoff incident: "The Square of Strife!"
It's kind of stunning that when Israel's current internal tensions spilled over into a full fledged culture war, the match to ignite it was a staple of American Jewish life: mixed seating at prayer services. This issue combines many of the big ticket controversies that have embroiled Israeli society for years: sex-segregation in public places, the subjugation of women, and the encroachment of ultra orthodoxy into secular areas. It's one thing to have gender separation in public squares of B'nai Brak, or even parts of Jerusalem, but for it to happen in the heart of secular Tel Aviv feels like a deliberate provocation. As the Times of Israel reported before the incident:
On Friday before Yom Kippur, the Supreme Court rejected a petition to allow gender-segregated prayers in the square. The justices thus sided with the ruling of a lower court in favor of the Tel Aviv municipality, which forbade Rosh Yehudi from holding the event with a gender divider.
That ruling should have been the end of it, but it was barely the beginning. Israelis are not used to fighting over prayer spaces in public areas. It's not a major concern of theirs because each neighborhood follows its own customs. In Tel Aviv there is an enormous Friday night service with mixed seating at the port. There would not be a gender segregated service there, because Tel Aviv is the most progressive city in the country. In other places with larger Orthodox populations, services in public areas have gender separation. But to push this matter in Tel Aviv breaks what had been a long lasting status quo, an encroachment, with the intent of staking out new territory for Orthodoxy - to create a "fact on the ground." And the response to that was one of those "enough is enough" moments for the seculars. I do sympathize with that, having faced similar situations both there and here, but resorting to violence was not tactically smart. So the fact that fighting over a mehitzah (partition) became front page news in Israeli papers (and not just the English ones) was a big deal.
I concur with Yossi Klein Halevi, who wrote:
In past years, Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur was a model of tolerance. There was no secular outrage against a mechitza in the streets. What changed this year is the government’s war against liberal Israelis, who are fighting for the survival of their Israel, their ability to continue living in this country. This year a public mechitza in Tel Aviv was especially provocative, given the growing phenomenon of women being pushed to the back of the bus – metaphorically and sometimes literally – around the country. I wish the protesters had resisted the provocation of Rosh Yehudi, but I understand their desperation.
Read some of the reports below, and think about how unacceptable enforced separate seating has become in non-Orthodox settings here. What used to be tolerated as the "least common denominator" back in the days before women could be rabbis and count in the minyan, has now become, in the eyes of many, a moral outrage. It's just another example of the widening culture war among Jews. Right now, no one seems interested in bridging that gap. Prime Minister Netanyahu had an opportunity to be a statesman but instead tried to stoke the flames and tie this violence to the judicial reform protests, in order to divide and conquer, banking that some Israelis who resist judicial reform might also resist mixed seating and might be lured over to his side. Protest leader Shikma Bressler (whom I spoke about on Yom Kippur) had this response on X (see below; the Google translation isn't perfect - it's not "support his brother" but "pitting his brothers against one another"). | 
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