It is very hard for an outsider to know what to make of the current wave of populist protest in Israel which, though advocating “social justice” in Israel has nothing to say about the occupation and repression of the Palestinians.
Over 300,000 people have come out into the streets in support of the goals of the movement, which were initially motivated by the unavailability or unaffordability of adequate housing but which have broadened to include the crippling overall cost of living, the growing inequality of wealth within Israeli society, and what the Israeli journalist Dimi Reider has described as “the parenting costs, the free-fall in the quality of public education, the overworked, unsustainable healthcare system, the complete and utter detachment of most politicians, on most levels, from most of the nation.”
Remarkably, polls show that up to 90% of the Israeli general public support the demands for economic reform, including many working-class hardline nationalists and Likud activists. In its broadest form, as the Israeli activist Jeff Halper writes, “the demonstrations currently roiling Israel constitute a grassroots challenge to Israel’s neo-liberal regime. Beginning as an uprising of the middle classes….it has spread to the working class, the poor and the Arab communities as well.”
Last Monday the leaders of the protest movement, as well as student leaders and representatives of various social organizations, issued a joint statement setting forth the movement’s goals in more detail. “For a number of decades, the various governments of Israel have opted for an economic policy of privatization that leaves the free market without reins…making our daily existence a war for survival to subsist with dignity,” the document begins. It goes on to demand that social inequalities be minimized; that the cost of living be lowered; that full employment be achieved; that action be taken to meet “the essential needs of the weaker population in the country, with an emphasis on the handicapped, the elderly and the sick;” and that the state invest in public education, health, transportation, and public infrastructures.
A most admirable set of demands. Indeed, they could be transplanted to this country with very few modifications—which is not at all surprising, since the triumph of the right in Israel and its Likudist “neo-liberal” economics is closely modeled on the greed-is-good and the devil-take-the-hindmost raw plutocracy of the Republican party hereabouts.
The problem is that the leaders of the protest movement have made a conscious decision not to include the demand that the occupation and repression of the Palestinians be brought to an end; indeed, even the demand that the various forms of discrimination against the Arab citizens of Israel be ended has the potential to badly split the movement. As the Haaretz columnist Akiva Eldar has recently caustically observed: “social justice, and justice in general, ends for a considerable number of the demonstrators at the outskirts of Umm al-Fahm [the largest Israeli Arab city]. Never mind the gates of Nablus.”
As might be expected, the decision to focus only on social justice for Israelis rather than on justice for the Palestinians has caused some division within the Israeli left, as illustrated by the contrasting positions taken by two of Israel’s most astute, outspoken, and morally admirable young analysts and journalists, Dimi Reider and Joseph Dana. Reider has made a powerful case:
“It should be admitted…that the Israeli left has utterly and abjectly failed to [persuade] Israelis in the project of ending the occupation. There was never a choice between a social struggle focused on the occupation and a social struggle temporarily putting the conflict aside, because the first attempt would have flopped. There was nothing to be gained by trying the same thing again for the Nth time.”
Dana concedes that “The sad reality is that if Israelis discuss Palestinian rights and specifically the rights of Palestinians under Israeli occupation they very quickly lose public support.…Had protesters connected their struggle for social justice to the occupation, many fewer Israelis would have joined the protests.” Even so, he is very uneasy about the strategy chosen by the protest leaders: “The protesters’ working definition of ‘social justice’ is unclear and full of contradictions. The rights of Israelis are inextricably tied with the rights of Palestinians, both inside the 1967 borders and in the Occupied Territories. The protesters, like most of Israeli society, are operating under the assumption that they are disconnected from the Palestinians who live under Israeli military occupation. But the fact is that one regime rules the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and any discussion of the allocation of resources, not to mention social justice, must take into account the rights of everyone who lives under the regime.”
The moral as well as practical dilemma for the Israeli left is acute. Many of Israel’s bravest and most admirable opponents of the occupation—people like Halper, Bernie Avishai, Gideon Levy, Yitzhak Laor, and others—are enthusiastic about the protest movement. Others, like Akiva Eldar, Amira Hass, and Uri Avnery, while of course strongly supporting the social justice goals, are uneasy about the decision to exclude the occupation or skeptical about the likely outcome. For example, Hass writes: “In the coming months, as the movement grows, it will split. Some will continue to think and demand ‘justice’ within the borders of one nation, always at the expense of the other nation that lives in this land. Others, however, will understand that this will never be a country of justice and welfare if it is not a state of all its citizens.”
In light of divisions within the Israeli left and the persuasive arguments on both sides of the debate, an outsider is in no position to reach a confident assessment about the issue. Yet, I can’t help feeling uncomfortable about the current strategy of the protest leaders. First, there is an important difference between the social justice protests and the last mass protests in Israel, which were over Israel’s complicity in the 1982 Sabra and Shatilla massacres in Lebanon. The latter was unambiguously driven by moral considerations; the former, while certainly containing a moral component, is also driven simply by economic self-interest, especially since it has become a populist movement linking the Israeli right with the left. For that reason, there is little reason to be hopeful that the movement signals a moral transformation of Israeli society.
Social injustice in Israel is inextricably linked to the occupation. In the first instance, as a number of the protest leaders and their supporters have pointed out, the enormous public resources devoted to the settlements and the armed forces necessary to protect them are resources that are not available for the rest of society. Even more fundamentally, the occupation and repression of the Palestinians is so morally poisonous that it is impossible to imagine that a truly just society can be created –even if only for the Jews themselves—until it has ended.
This is a crosspost from Jerome Slater's blog.
Thanks, Jerry, for an excellent overview.
I think the protests have a number of inbuilt, self-destructive flaws. As Tom Segev pointed out in Friday’s Ha’aretz*, they lack the explosive energy that all successful revolutionary movements must possess. Their insistence on the apolitical nature of the struggle means that do not pose any real threat to the Israeli establishment (a sine qua non for real change), and their refusal to broach the occupation and discrimination against Palestinians within Israel demonstrates that they wish to preserve the underlying “Zionist unity” that has been the undoing of every social movement in Jewish Palestine/Israel, since the 1930s.
Others have pointed out that the general mobilisation of the reserves in anticipation of the UN vote on Palestinian statehood will contribute to the dissolution of the protests both physically and emotionally, reminding participants of ostensibly greater dangers, priorities and affinities, thereby shattering any “class” solidarity that may have developed over the past few weeks.
* I don’t think Segev’s article has been translated. Here’s a link to the Hebrew: link to haaretz.co.il
The failure of these protests to embrace a wider view of social justice (including occupation and ethnic discrimination) also means that they lack inner cohesion – between the children of the middle class who can’t afford to live in the centre of the country (the “founders” of the movement), and the children of the poor who can’t afford to live even in the development towns and extreme periphery. Both the government and the opposition are keenly aware of these differences and lack of cohesion, and can be expected to exploit them to the maximum. The makeup of both the government and the protesters’ committees (public administrators and academics) suggests that they are already addressing only the middle class protesters, who will almost certainly abandon the others if and when their own needs have been met (or they have been sufficiently hoodwinked).
I am reminded of Sharansky, who was initially hailed as a human rights activist, when he was in fact only a Jewish rights activist, or merely a Sharansky rights activist.
“I am reminded of Sharansky, who was initially hailed as a human rights activist, when he was in fact only a Jewish rights activist, or merely a Sharansky rights activist.”
Natan Sharansky was not a human rights activist? When you spend eight years in the gulag for practicing your religion and calling for democracy, then you can make judgments about others.
You should be a little humble and not define human rights activism as someone who agrees with your politics.
Thanks for the advice on humility, Hophmi, but since his arrival in Israel, Sharansky has proven to be an ardent supporter of the violation of human rights of Palestinians. So either he has drastically altered his worldview on the subject of human rights (something of which he has given no indication), or he was never a human rights activist in the first place.
“Natan Sharansky was not a human rights activist?”
No. No one who does what he did regarding the Palestinian can be considered a human rights activist.
“When you spend eight years in the gulag for practicing your religion and calling for democracy, then you can make judgments about others.”
No, all one need do is think in order to judge him. And his actions stink. One he got his, he wasn’t about human rights, he was about bigotry against the Arabs.
The unforgettable message of the tent city demonstrations are that “we have more in common than we have differences.”
Prior to that, the common assumption was “we are inherently different”.
Ironically, the emphasis on the occupation as primary conflict that must religiously be mentioned in every political conversation in Israel, is a dividing one, one that makes change NOT POSSIBLE, as it conflicts with hearts and minds.
In contrast, the absence of commentary on the occupation will ultimately make resolution/removal of the occupation inevitable, as the prejudices will be known gutturally as false.
(Unless of course Hamas and solidarity or likud and their solidarity decide to disrupt the genuine good will, as has happened at every juncture of hope).
“You can only get to the “father” through me” (the political path). Of course, unless you go directly to the common, the social.
“Hamas and solidarity or likud and their solidarity decide to disrupt the genuine good will”
Richard, against all evidence I still hope to see the day when you question the moral purity of your own faction. Until then I suppose we can continue to see this scapegoating of the Israeli right and the Palestinian right (Hamas) and even “dissent”, while never questioning anything done by liberal Zionists.
I think your theory of social change is a bit naive. American history shows that people can sometimes take liberal positions on social issues and still be racist–they can be concerned about the working man, so long as the working man in question isn’t black or Asian. Some people do gradually lose their prejudices, but others cling to them with emotional fervor.
How can the tent protesters ignore the occupation when Israeli settlements partake in the protest?
The rise of the NSDAP was in many ways a social protest movement by the German middle classes. It was also very inclusive – while primarily middle class, it was also open to workers, the unemployed and on the other end of the spectrum, the rich.
Of course, there were people who were not invited. And it was as unnecessary to even explicitly spell out who was excluded then as it is now.
I’m not saying that the J14 movement will lead to such a radicalization. It’s much too early for that. Just a little reminder that social protest movements do not necessarily result in a more open, inclusive society.
P.S.: I’d really like to see a statistical analysis of the protests’ participants. I have read that Israeli Arabs and ultra-orthodox Jews are extremely underrepresented. Anybody know more about the composition of the ‘tent city’, especially class/income-wise?
Koshiro,
There is a superficial similarity, but the NSDAP was unashamedly political and ideological. Both nationalism and socialism ensured internal cohesion and solidarity across class divides, and the combination of the two proved extremely powerful.
The Israeli protests are nationalist by default and socialist by context. That is not enough to hold a movement together. The lacunae are easily rationalised, and the participants easily divided along class lines – or their demands trumped by the national identity they share with the ruling classes.
It’s mistake to call the NSDAP socialist – at least as far as socialism is usually understood, namely in a Marxist sense. Its name was simply a product of the political atmosphere of the 1920s, when it appeared that all political power would rely on the working class. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party that triumphed in the 1930s would more aptly have been called National Collectivist German Middle Class Party. This fact is often vehemently denied by the current German Buergertum, but the answers to the simple questions “Who voted for the Nazis?” and “Who were the NSDAP members?” usually put an end to such notions.
Anyway: I was just pointing out that the current protest movement in Israel definitely has potential for radically nationalist and exlusionist agendas as well as for more benign ones. We will see what happens when political powers adapt to the movement (assuming it doesn’t just fizzle out and nothing changes.)
Koshiro, what you say/suggest about who really pushed the NAZI cause in its formative years, my studies indicate it was primarily (along with WW1 soldiers like Hitler, the Freicorps, etc) the lower & middle middle class. Even Hitler flirted with joining the reds before he was given career opportunity as a spokesman for the NAZI cause by a fellow veteran.
“Anyway: I was just pointing out that the current protest movement in Israel definitely has potential for radically nationalist and exlusionist agendas ”
Based on what, exactly?
This is not a situation where the economy is depressed and people are starving. It’s a cost-of-living, quality-of-living type thing, and it’s a sign of discontent with a broken (broken, not useless) political system. If the protest fails, it will be because things are not really that bad, and government will be in a better position to satisfy the populace.
The protesters are mostly secular people (several analyses refer to them as the grandchildren of the founders of the state). And one would not expect the ultra-orthodox to protest. They are huge recipients of government largesse.
Oh, the NSDAP did have a strongly socialist, working-class interest wing in its earlier years. It’s just that it later largely discarded this in favor of an approach aimed at the middle classes while remaining open to lower-class and upper-class voters.
Any analysis of the NSDAP’s voters and members in the 1930s will show a distinct underrepresentation of lower classes (blue-collar workers) and a very strong overrepresentation of middle classes. There’s just no way around this, however much current German middle classes want to paint the NSDAP as “Socialist = leftist = not us!”
Based on the fact that Israel has radical political politicians in abundance, is a deeply divided society with a less than stable political system, contains a strong nationalist undercurrent and rules over a subjugated population that is considered an enemy by the majority? For starters?
The settler power is already doing its best to mobilize the protesters against the Palestinians by promising increased colonization as the solution. I see no reason to rule out their being successful.
Aren’t you confusing the Obamaites & Tea Partiers in your comparison with the Jewish grass roots protesters? And don’t both main political parties in the US & all Jewish Israelis come down on the same side regarding any rights claimed by Palestinians in Israel and/or the OTs? The side that dismisses those right?
“never to be a country of justice & welfare if it is not a state of all its citizens?”
shades of the u. s. of a. prior to the apartheid-ending civil rights struggle of the sixties
& now the struggle to bring empire-usa down
selective memory
selective priorities
selective goals
self-selected selectors are selecting out of realism and sliding, selectively, toward an apartheid implosion
Avnery quotes Pericles in a recent article on the the tent protests: “just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean that politics won’t take an interest in you!”. Don’t know how accurate this quote is but it was something that occurred to me during the 60s when many estranged youth decided to “drop out”. If these tent city protesters do not soon realize that what they are doing is highly political and act accordingly they will become quite irrelevant.
As many have already said that will be their likely fate — it would just be confirmation that the anti-Arab racism is so deeply embedded in Israeli society that it is no longer possible for Israel to repair itself through an internal political process. Perhaps, just a small perhaps the protest coalition could agree that the reforms they are seeking are not possible as long as the WB settler movement and the military absorb state resources. More likely the movement will disappear the day the reserves are mobilized to put down the Palestinian demonstrations after Sept 20th.
I just can’t see how Zionism is going to survive. There is no point in even talking about the human rights of Palestinians . Nobody in Israel gives a sh@t.
But they don’t just shaft the Palestinians. They shaft their own people. How is a 30 year old supposed to build a family and buy a place to live?
It is all sustainable for as long as the Israeli elite has credibility. How long will they pull that off for?
How could they care about their own people anyway in such a society based on brutality and violence ?
And don’t forget Israel is a fully paid up member of the neoliberal club which has run out of road and is looking like plunging the world into a massive global recession. Israel’s Islamophobia is a beaten docket. The US is going to have to cut down its military. Europe won’t be able to afford social welfare for the Palestinians.
When you are born you get a ticket to the freak show. In Israel the freaks are all Jewish.
Even if the latest movement fails the seeds of the next one are being established. Without an outlet of expression social problems often explode especially in the Middle East especially in times of economic cutbacks.
“As outlined in another Institute report, Israel can become self-reliant only by, in a bold stroke rather than in increments, liberalizing its economy, cutting taxes, relegislating a free-processing zone, and selling-off public lands and enterprises ….” (A Clean Break:
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, 2000)
One part of the “Clean Break” report not usually quoted. Yes, the neocons helped ensnare Israel into adopting neo-liberalism. Not that it wouldn’t have occurred in any event, finance a key component of imperial control.
The thing to remember is that the common thread to recent protests worldwide is a reaction to the economic policies known as neo-liberalism, that is, the removal of any and all social programs/benefits which interfere with profit maximization, particularly financial profits and unfettered financial control of the economy.
The protests and other reactions to neo-liberal globalization and neo-liberalism are coming somewhat late and have been anticipated. In the U.S. Space Command’s Vision for 2020, they anticipate that “globalization of the world economy” will lead to “a widening between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’” with “deepening economic stagnation, political instability, and cultural alienation” leading to violence and unrest among the “have-nots.” The point being that demonstrations have been anticipated and planned to be dealt with.
These demonstrations and actions in opposition to neo-liberalism are to be welcomed, regardless of the tactical decision to ignore the full extent of the social justice issues. We have entered a period of rapid and severe discontinuity, the culmination of neo-liberalism and neo-liberal globalization which will witness severe social disruptions worldwide. The success or failure of citizen actions could well determine the extent to which the Third World model of economic exploitation is expanded globally. Stopping neo-liberalism and neo-liberal globalization is essential to prevent a full scale slide into the abyss.
It saddens me that in all likelihood these protests will lead to more taking of Palestinian land to create “affordable housing” (read: Greater Israel)
How I wish they were truly driven by righteousness rather than self-interest.
I think it’s just that Israeli Jews (the majority of them) are deeply racist and simply don’t consider the Israeli Arabs or Palestinians to be worthy of the same social change/consideration/etc.
It’s kind of like how these same Zionists will consider themselves the ‘Native Americans’ in the conflict. Total lack of self-awareness.
They live in the Zionist bubble while profiting off of Palestinian misery and US tax dollars and support.
“Jewish life more valuable than a Palestinian life”
Jewish racist.
link to youtube.com
“The problem is that the leaders of the protest movement have made a conscious decision not to include the demand that the occupation and repression of the Palestinians be brought to an end; indeed, even the demand that the various forms of discrimination against the Arab citizens of Israel be ended has the potential to badly split the movement. ”
Basically giving support to the apartheid government of Israel. Approval by ignoring the core issues having to do with social justice.