Michael Walzer has a good piece in the New Republic on the tent protests that (while it defines community in ethnic-religious terms that young Jews are turned off by), repeatedly attacks the settlers and makes some excellent points:
This is the first uprising, anywhere in the world, against a successful neo-liberal regime. Israel’s macro-economy is doing very well (I make no predictions about what it will do tomorrow): unemployment is low, the shekel is strong, foreign investors are interested, there is a lot of entrepreneurial energy, and economic growth is substantial and steady. At the same time, the damage that neo-liberal policies do to communal solidarity, to welfare provision, and to the maintenance of the public sector is visible everywhere in the country (except in the occupied territories), and it is increasingly difficult for many families, with two wage-earners, to achieve and sustain a decent life.
So this is a rebellion whose motto might be: It’s the micro-economy, stupid! But its actual slogan is: The people demand social justice!…
The uprising is a collective effort to escape the constraints and divisions of the Israeli debate about security, the nonexistent “peace process,” and the occupation. When the emerging leaders of the uprising insist that their protest is “non-political,” they mean that it’s not about war and peace. They know, of course, that everything is connected and that the difficulties they are experiencing are partly caused by massive state investment in the occupied territories..
This is a protest against what Israel has become, in the name of what it once was. It is an effort by the youngest Israelis to recapture an older, more egalitarian, more idealistic, country that their parents lost. This is the view of the uprising that, with all my heart, I want to be the right one.
