The Fight for Justice

This largest protest in the history of the country marked the culmination of a wave of demonstrations that started in July. The initiators were students who had set up tents on the fashionable Rothschild-Boulevard in Tel Aviv because of their anger at the unaffordable rental rates. The Trajtenberg Commission was founded soon afterward with the purpose of giving Netanyahu’s government practical recommendations for the improvement of the social situation. However, it does not appear that these measures will suffice to actually create changed circumstances. As a result, many people assume that there will be a new round of protests this summer.



There is still much debate about the question as to what the “Israeli Summer” of 2011 ultimately accomplished. But it is certain that something has been put on the agenda that will not disappear so quickly: namely, a social awareness coupled with the perception that it is time to simply no longer accept some things as given. This involves the understanding that “we are also actors who can change something and not just victims,” according to Yossi Yonah.  He is a philosophy professor by profession and heads the team of experts that advises the protest movement. He emphasizes that “social protest evokes hopes for a better future. It is not the protest of despair, but the community reclaims something that belongs to it.”

Mordechai Kremnitzer, emeritus professor of law and Vice President for Research at the Israel Democracy Institute, agrees wholeheartedly. The entire protest movement was a surprise, he says in his Jerusalem office, because people who seemed to be apathetic suddenly showed that they were “active citizens of the state.” He has no doubts that the next election campaign will be characterized by socio-economic issues.

In any case, Israelis have already discovered their own strength as consumers. When people recently found out that a chocolate bar from the Strauss Group cost less than half the price in New York, a call to boycott spread like wildfire via Facebook. Since then, price comparisons are also covered on television, in the newspaper columns, and on the Internet; a new start-up company informs people where certain products can be purchased for the lowest price.

This is mainly a protest by the secular middle class, which carefully ignores the majority of Middle East in order to not break the broad consensus. “There are definitely people in the movement who claim that social justice cannot be achieved without an end to the occupation,” advisor Yossi Yonah admits. He adds that individuals who stand up for the rights of the Palestinians quickly encounter impatience in the current atmosphere. But he is still encouraged by “the many energies” that have been mobilized.

New Activists

And things are also happening under the surface. In each one of the 120 places where tents were pitched last summer, there is an entirely new generation of activists who continue to network with each other, learn from each other, and get advanced training. Up to now, none of the leading minds of the movement have allowed themselves to be hitched to a political cart. This simultaneously means strength and weakness – although their hesitation is probably quite symptomatic for people in Israel who fight for democratic goals, women’s rights, better living conditions for foreign workers, or environmental protection. According to Kremnitzer of the Israel Democracy Institute, the country has a strong civil society with countless NGOs and much committed personnel, but “the disadvantage is that it comes at the expense of political participation.” He believes that such people would be found in politics in other places.

In any case, the protest movement of last summer has succeeded in concentrating the civil energies that would otherwise be dispersed in different directions. A 2011 youth study by the Friedrich-Ebert foundation reflects the “diversity and contradictory nature of the demands,” says co-publisher Roby Nathanson of the Macro Center for Political Economics. According to him, the young Israelis (the age groups from 15 to 18 and 21 to 24) are very ambivalent and cannot be put into categories, which seems to correspond with the chaotic reality of the country. “Israel stands out internationally in terms of research and development but simultaneously has no elaborate infrastructures. Social solidarity, the top priority in the years after the state’s foundation, has been replaced by an immense prosperity gap between the few super-rich and the large majority of the rest.

Less Appreciation of Democracy

In keeping with this, many young Israelis wish for a Jewish but simultaneously pluralistic democratic state with economic equality and a high standard of living. In case of a conflict, 70 percent would decide for the security of the state and against democratic values. But the appreciation of democracy has also decreased on the whole in Israel during recent years. A measuring stick is the annual Democracy Index of the Israel Democracy Institute. According to the index, the definition of Israel as a Jewish state has become increasingly important and ranks ahead of its democratic character in the hierarchy – although the two are not seen as a contradiction. “Many people possibly do not even know how to appreciate what democratic values mean because they seem so obvious to them here,” Kremnitzer speculates. He thinks that very few people would first define themselves as Israeli state citizens. “The Jews first understand themselves as Jewish and the Arabs as Arab.” Just like the separate school systems, the fact that the two groups of the Arabs and the Ultra-Orthodox Jews are exempted from military duty makes it more difficult to create an inclusive concept of national citizenship,” says Kremnitzer. According to him, this prevents people from becoming more closely acquainted with the “other” and just solidifies the prevailing stereotypes.

Kremnitzer adds that the following principle basically applies today: The more religious people are, the less respect they show for the others. He thinks the religious Zionism has become more nationalistic on the one hand; on the other hand, the Ultra-Orthodox Jews have become more extremist since they “behave with less tolerance in Israel than in other countries where the principle of not antagonizing non-Jews applies.” But he says that what is often forgotten in the heated arguments of the convinced secularists against the Haredi Jews is “their fear of the modern world.” In turn, this also leads to fanaticism – as recently shown in Beit Shemesh.

The other group that is on the fringe of Israel’s majority is the Arab Israelis. According to a Dahaf study, their tendency to identify with the state depends upon whether they are allowed equal opportunities. More than 80 percent feel foreign to the Israeli majority society, but they also do not consider themselves as part of the Arab people. This hybrid existence – which has definitely also produced stories of success – was recently the basis of the uproar about Salim Joubran, the only Arab judge among a total of fifteen Supreme Court members. At the end of the retirement celebration for the departing Chairman Dorit Beinish, Joubran stood silently during the joint singing of the Hatikvah national anthem in front of the television cameras. The fact that he did not loudly identify with the “yearning of the Jewish soul for freedom” bothered ultra-right-wing politicians, who accused him of lacking loyalty. But they just had mediocre success. Most Israelis are quite aware that the problem lies in the nature of the hymn and not in the unyieldingness of the Supreme Court judge. Right after the uproar, Premier Netanyahu sent his special envoy Molcho to Joubran to tell him that he did not expect him to sing along and very much appreciated that the judge stood up during the singing. This silenced the opposition from the right for the time being, but it did not change anything about the basic problem.

Now almost 95 years old, lawyer Miriam Ben-Porat knows what it means to have a role as a pioneer. She was once the first woman in the distinguished circle of the Supreme Court judges in Israel. She now pleads for adding an additional verse to the anthem so that Arab Israelis can also identify with it. She says that every Jewish Israeli has two identification circles: a “Jewish one that connects him with Jews throughout the world and one as an Israeli, to which also non-Jewish citizens belong.” To put it mildly, her suggestion did not meet with much enthusiasm.

Further Steps

There is no constitution to give this heterogeneous and fragmented society a common basis. But this is also the reason why it has not been created up to now. Is the protest movement a further step by Israel in the direction of a citizen’s society, such as those in Western countries? In the meantime, marginalized groups of residents such as Ethiopian immigrants and especially poor citizens have certainly felt strengthened in going into the streets and therefore fighting for their rights as Israelis. That the entire large protest movement will soon flare up again is actually not questioned by anyone. The open question is just whether it will once again be staged in such a non-violent way again this summer.
Not a single pane of glass was broken the last time.

Gisela Dachs is an Israeli correspondent for the Zeit newspaper and lives in Tel Aviv.