The Hebrew Summer? Call for Saturday protests in Israel

[petros]

Last weekend saw 250,000 protesers on Rothchild Blvd. in Tel Aviv. Damanding social housing and lower sales taxes. How big will it get this weekend?

JERUSALEM — Israel's social protest movement on Wednesday called for demonstrations to be held across the Jewish state on Saturday except in Tel Aviv which saw mass rallies last week.

"We decided not to stage demonstrations in Tel Aviv but to call for rallies across the country," protest leader Stav Shafir told AFP.

"The important thing is to prove that the protest is not limited to people from Tel Aviv."

Student union leader Itzik Shmuli told public radio that Saturday rallies were planned in Afula in the north, and in the southern city of Beersheva.

Israel has been shaken since mid-July by a rapidly growing protest movement demanding cheaper housing, education and health care.

But Haaretz newspaper warned on Wednesday that complacency could derail the movement.

"Protest organisers are facing the worst enemy in their struggle: loss of interest," the daily said.

"Organisers should not become discouraged even if the turnout is lower at the next demonstration or the media decides not to cover events in Rothschild Boulevard," it said of Tel Aviv's upscale area where many protesters set up camp.

An opinion poll published by Channel 10 television late on Tuesday showed that 88 percent of respondents said they supported the movement, with 46 percent who voted for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party saying they had joined protests.

A committee charged with examining the demands of the protest movement met for the first time on Tuesday, expressing the hope that its work would provide Israelis with a "better future."



No media coverage? Shhhhhh they're protesting!

 

[DaSleeper]

Did the protesters get joined by troublemakers that burned and looted like in other "civilised" countries?????

 

[petros]

With 16% sales tax, no where to live, lack of employment and soaring food costs? It won't take long before somebody whips out a pack of matches.

 

[mentalfloss]

Not the Israeli summer... yet

Recent protests in Israel vaguely resemble the earlier protests that sparked the Arab Spring.

A Social Revolution?
The huge public rallies mark an attempt by the Israeli public to bring issues such as affordable housing, healthcare, raising the minimum wage and education, among the movement's key demands, back into the light of day. It's also a clear antidote to the long felt apathy and impotence on the part of Israelis towards changing their dysfunctional political system.

From the start of the protests, which I wrote about when they first began in Tel Aviv, organisers have been very careful to characterise their actions as a struggle for "social" rather than "political" justice. One of the main slogans of the protests, "The people demand social justice", copies the meter and rhythm of the chants from Tahrir, but it is definitely not the same thing as "The People Demand the Fall of the System", the ubiquitous battle cry of the Arab world this year.

But can the hundreds of thousands of protesters in Israel hope to achieve what can only be described as a socio-economic revolution - in the most basic sense of the word, as they are trying to return back to an earlier social compact - without radically transforming the existing political system? If the protests in Tunis or Cairo are any guide, economic grievances will not be addressed unless, as the chant says, the existing system, and the state that enforces and represents it, is dismantled.

Bring the Social to the Public
The organizers of this still somewhat amorphous movement, many of who come from the Israeli Left and the Kibbutz-affiliated movement, "Dror Yisrael" (which describes itself as the largest movement in Israel with both Arab and Jewish members, surely understand that the social and political are inseparable in reality. Indeed, maintaining that rhetorical fiction has been one of the mechanisms by which Israel's political and economic elite have managed both to continue the occupation indefinitely while arrogating an ever increasing share of the once egalitarian society's national wealth to themselves.

One of the key elements of neoliberal discourse is precisely its claim that the politicisation of markets - that is, government intervention in any form - makes them inefficient and inequitable. Only by leaving them alone, or at least alone with economists, hedge fund managers, bankers and IFI officials from the WTO, IMF and their sister institutions, will markets be able to function efficiently, allowing the most wealth to spread widely across society.

In the United States, as long as Americans could keep going deeper into debt to finance both consumer lifestyles and health and other costs the state refuses to cover, this fiction could be sustained. Today it stands unmasked, yet so strong is the ideology that very few people are taking to the streets, a once progressive Democratic President bows to its will even at the cost of his political life, and the most angry Americans have joined the Tea Party, a movement that reinforces the very dynamics causing their suffering.

The Power of Memory
But Israelis' long dormant memory of the social solidarity and collectivist social ethos that once energised Zionism has provided the foundation for this sudden explosion of support for re-orienting the economy back towards a more egalitarian past, when the Israeli state took care of its citizens to a far greater degree than it does today.

The big tent strategy pursued by protest organizers has helped unify previously disconnected protests on issues such as gasoline, bread prices, and even cottage cheese prices, as well as strikes by social workers and doctors during the last year, enabling them to morph into one larger movement. But in order to achieve this unity a decision was clearly made to keep the occupation out of the discourse of the protests. Such a strategy allowed organisers to weather the attempts early on by the government and right wingers to label the movement precisely as one of Leftie elitists who are out of touch with majority of Israeli values. That in turn created space for representatives of the entire spectrum of Israeli political and social life to participate in the movement, including Palestinians.

Even some of the most hard core settlers have joined the protests, arguing that on social issues they are "more left than the Left". This claim is not that wide of the mark; one of the traits most Israelis admire about settlers, even when they don't support them, is precisely the collective ethos, "pioneering spirit" and self-sacrifice that once were traits of Israeli society more broadly, when it was under the hegemony of the Labor movement.

A New Enemy?
The increasingly rapid decline of the United States is only the most recent exemplar of the way "really existing neoliberalism" works on individuals and their freedoms and choices. The ideologies of "choice", "freedom" and "individualism" have always masked the reality that in power, neoliberals have tended not to "shrink the state" so much as redirect resources away from the majority of the people and towards the corporate interests they represent, while allocating social and other discretionary spending to groups who are most willing to help preserve their power even if they don't share their ideology (the decades' long feting of Shas and other haredi groups by successive secular and neoliberal parties is the best example of this trend).

And so the increasingly neoliberal policies of successive Israeli governments, of the so-called Left as much as of the Right (which is why organisers of the protests have correctly decided that using such labels is meaningless), have played a major role in the rise in housing prices and other goods and services against which Israelis are finally rebelling.

Not the Israeli summer... yet