Summary
The Israeli protest movement of summer 2011, named for the tents first erected on July 14, which in Moments of Resistance Chapter 8 brought the Occupy repertoire of resistance to Israel: a spontaneous, inclusive social protest against unaffordable housing and socio-economic inequality, two months before Occupy Wall Street, inspired by Tahrir Square and Spain’s M-15 (PDF p.252-253). It is the movement also covered as 2011 Israeli Social Protests.
Details
- Over 52 days (July 14-September 3) demonstrators protested unaffordable housing and increasing inequality; some 10% of Israel’s total population went out on the streets, the call for social justice was supported by 85% of the population (YNET poll, August 2, 2011), and mainstream media facilitated mobilization of more than half a million demonstrators (Shechter 2012) (Moments of Resistance, PDF p.253).
- The movement’s popularity forced the government to acknowledge responsibility for the crisis; following the Trachtenberg Commission (2011) it adopted new taxation of the rich, military budget cuts and policies to reduce poverty and social gaps, but after the September 3 “One Million March” the leaders announced the dismantling of the tent camps, most protesters demobilized, and the movement could not remobilize when the government reverted to neo-liberal policies (PDF p.253).
- The Israeli version combined features of Egypt’s demand for free elections and Spain’s protest against the absence of political alternatives despite free elections, because of the local mix of a democratic regime for Israelis and a military regime for Palestinians; while political space for Palestinians under occupation was clearly closed, the closure of space for Israeli citizens’ interests was much more subtle (PDF p.253-254).
- Its window of opportunity was framed, on Grinberg’s argument, not only by the student holiday but by the Palestinian refusal to play the role of enemy before the September UN statehood bid and by Netanyahu’s Congress tour de force becoming an anti-climax, after the cottage-cheese Facebook campaign had already mobilized almost half a million supporters against basic-goods prices (PDF p.259-260).
- Its leading generational class was the B Generation (PDF p.260-262).
- Section IV, J14’s Imagined People: the movement began with Daphne Leef, a 25-year-old student evacuated for refusing a higher rent, whose Facebook-posted tent on Rothschild Boulevard was joined within days by encampments all over Israel — representative in the periphery, including homeless families, encampments by Arab citizens and one by migrant workers, but none in the OPT, so the protest tacitly demarcated the borders of the Israeli sovereign state while avoiding any reference to the occupation (PDF p.263).
- Within ten days 20-40,000 people were mobilised, by August 300,000, and in the One Million March more than half a million in 12 cities; the movement expanded to every group’s own issue under the common denominator of inequality and discrimination within the 1967 borders, and its apparently a-political, carnival inclusiveness reconstructed peoplehood in the slogan “The people demand social justice” — its two radical innovations were tacitly demarcating the borders by where housing was demanded, to the exclusion of the OT, and including the entire citizen body, Jews and Arabs alike, in the boundaries of the people (PDF p.264-265).
- Counter-Mo(ve)ment 1, In Search of Threats: after the Palestinian “threat” vanished Netanyahu manipulated the Iranian nuclear “threat”, then anti-democratic and anti-Palestinian legislation, then a new “external-internal” threat among African refugees and asylum seekers; after the encampments were dismantled ethno-class tensions reappeared, culminating in the “despairing June days” and Moshe Silman’s self-immolation, and centre and left parties channelled the movement’s demands to their own sectorial agendas, with Yesh Atid shifting equality of rights to equality of obligations against the ultra-Orthodox and Arab citizens (PDF p.266-269).
- Counter-Mo(ve)ment 2 in the 2013 electoral campaign: political actors shortened the time to elections to obstruct new political identities, Netanyahu’s Kadima coalition was dismantled within 71 days, Operation Pillar of Cloud (162 Palestinians and Israelis killed, as printed) was ignored by all major parties once it ended, and the newborn parties gained 31 seats (19 Yesh Atid, 12 Jewish Home) on a joint demand for conscription for all that completely distorted the 2011 social justice demands, while the Mizrahi lower classes were disregarded by all parties except Shas (PDF p.270-274).
- Chapter 8’s Conclusion and Chapter 9 repeat that J14 adopted the Occupy repertoire imported from Tahrir and Puerta del Sol — encampment in city squares, general assemblies, consensual decisions and the strategic refusal to negotiate with the government — only within the legitimate borders of the State of Israel, tacitly emphasising that the government did build and subsidise housing, but only beyond those borders (PDF p.274-275, 291).
Related pages
Moments of Resistance, 2011 Israeli Social Protests, B Generation, Political Space, Movements of Resistance, Benjamin Netanyahu