The overwhelming majority of the Arab Israeli public saw last summer’s “social
justice” protests as justified and said they personally supported them,
according to figures from a study compiled by the Western Galilee Academic
College.
According to the figures, 69.2 percent of Arab Muslim
respondents said the protests were just, and 71.8% said they personally
supported the protests. Among Druse respondents, the figures were 88.2% and
70.6% respectively.
While the figures for the Arab Muslim sector were
significantly lower than those among the Jewish public (85% and 80%), Prof. Eran
Zaidise, who oversaw the survey, said they represented a remarkably high amount
of sympathy for the protests from the Arab sector.
“The fact that 70% of
the Arab Muslim sector supports a protest that is almost entirely run and
supported by Jews is surprising because usually the Arab sector doesn’t identify
with the problems or demands of the Jewish community because they have their own
concerns and politics.”
Zaidise said the figures were compiled from 750
questionnaires distributed over July, August and September of last year, with
200 of those distributed at the main Rothschild tent city and 263 from students
at the Western Galilee Open University, among other places.
This summer’s
coming protests will either resemble last year’s in that organizers will present
a non-partisan, apolitical front to draw in wider crowds, or that they will
become more political and more left wing at the expense of drawing a smaller
section of the public than last year’s, according to Zaidise.
“I doubt if
large protests like last summer’s could have much of a difference. Politicians
have no reason to change policy if there is no electoral reason to do so,”
Zaidise said in regard to the importance of adopting a clear political stance in
the protests.
Zaidise also accused last year’s protest organizers of
“trying to hold the stick at both ends,” by saying that they were looking to
change the government’s policies but not the government leadership
itself.
Zaidise drew a comparison between last summer’s protests and one
held Saturday night, which drew about 5,000 people to Rabin Square in Tel
Aviv.
Zaidise said Saturday’s protest was clearly “more red, partisan and
much more of an opposition protest than last year’s, but also much smaller. The
protests last year that brought in 300,000, 400,000 people aren’t the public
that supports this agenda.”
When asked what it would take for a new wave
of protests to be considered successful, she said “if to succeed is to make a
lot of noise and get people out on the streets, and to dictate the conversation
in the national media, then it succeeded [last year], but if success is to bring
widespread change in society then it didn’t succeed.”
At the end of the
day, the main problem in bringing a sweeping social change through political
protests, according to Zaidise, is that the public simply does not want to upend
its current leadership.
“For an effective protest, you have to be willing
to change the leadership and the people here aren’t ready for that yet.”