Summary
Lev Grinberg’s name in Moments of Resistance Chapter 8 for the generational class that led the J14 Movement: Israelis aged 25-35 in 2011, named both for the Hebrew letter Beth (B), which also means “home”, and for the “B Generation” collective wage agreements of the 1990s-2000s that discriminated against new workers in salary, social rights and pension rights (PDF p.260).
Details
- They had been politically traumatized by Rabin’s assassination at age 10-20, having lost their fervent hope to live in peace; skilled and well-educated, they could see rising inequality and the deterioration of their position compared to their parents, with less chance of highly paid positions and falling incomes (Shalev 2012; Shalev and Rosenhek 2012) (Moments of Resistance, PDF p.260).
- They differentiated themselves from the established parties and organised mainly in civil society organisations, activist groups and NGOs; their first public appearance was the 1998 students’ strike, whose slogan — students include everyone: Jews and Arabs, left and right, religious and secular, Oriental and European Jews, new migrants and long-time Israelis — reappeared in 2011, and the radicalized 2007 student strike fed directly into J14’s activists, some of whom built the new trade union “Power to the Workers” (PDF p.261).
- In the secondary teachers’ (2007), social workers’ (2011) and physicians’ (2011) strikes, B Generation members rose against their own union leaders because the agreements discriminated against them, rejecting the unions’ compromising in the name of younger workers (PDF p.262).
- Grinberg interprets them as the product of a double crisis, global and local, and as the generational class Standing (2011) called the precariat: all the negative effects of the neo-liberal economy, with no promise of stable jobs, rising salaries or undiminished social rights and pensions (PDF p.262).
- The B Generation also suffered the implications of the dual democratic-military regime and the tribal hostility; J14 managed to emerge, on Chapter 8’s account, thanks to the coming of political age of this entire generation, whose inclusive discourse and open-ended agenda reconstructed peoplehood in inclusive terms in the slogan “The people demand social justice” (PDF p.263, 265).
Related pages
Moments of Resistance, J14 Movement, Political Space, Tribal Channeling