A History of Protest

Just about anything is fair game for local protesters.

By LAWRENCE RIFKIN
Black Panthers 521 (photo credit: MOSHE MILNER / GPO)
Black Panthers 521
(photo credit: MOSHE MILNER / GPO)
PROTEST IN ISRAEL IS NOTHING NEW. LOOK AT Sallah Shabati. Stuck with his large family in a ma’abara, or transit camp, after arriving in the nascent Jewish state from an Arab country in the early 1950s, the lead character from the eponymous 1964 Israeli film takes on the system through protest. He wants a real apartment, not a shack or a tent.
Finally, he figures out how to get it – by demonstrating against the provision of public housing. His logic? You get what you don’t want, and true to the irony that was writer/director Efraim Kishon’s oeuvre, a new apartment is soon his.
No one really went around with signs demanding to remain in a tent, but contrary to the image in which 1950s Israel happily pulled together for the more important purpose of state-building, discontent has always come with the territory.
“There were lots of protests in the ma’abara period,” Bar-Ilan University professor Sam Lehman-Wilzig tells The Jerusalem Report. “It was chiefly about the ‘Israelization’ of the new immigrants and was usually localized. But things broadened during the Wadi Salib unrest of 1959 [when police shot a drunken man in a mostly Sephardi neighborhood of Haifa, setting off days of rioting and Ashkenazi-Sephardi tensions]; it was the first major explosion over social and ethnic issues, meaning discrimination.”
Social protests expanded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, says Lehman-Wilzig, a former chairman of the Israel Political Science Association and author of 1990s “Stiff-necked People, Bottle-necked System: The Evolution and Roots of Israeli Public Protests, 1949- 1986.” Most notable were the Black Panthers, a group of young Sephardim from Jerusalem who sought to overcome deep-seated discrimination and occasionally skirmished with the police. Then-prime minister Golda Meir eventually met with them in the spring of 1971, but later told reporters they “weren’t very nice,” which led to rioting several weeks later, with dozens of arrests and injuries.
“The Black Panthers were the first major eruption that had national ramifications,” he relates. “They really put social issues on the map and brought the Likud to power in 1977.”
The 1977 elections were a revolution because they marked the unseating of the Labor Party. Yet it may be Israel’s very political system, which is one of proportional rather than direct representation, that has made it a country of protests.
“It’s the first thing we do to express our opinion,” says the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Gadi Wolfsfeld, a professor of political science and communications. “In other countries, write your congressman.
The last thing an Israeli would do is write his Knesset Member.”
Often, individuals and small groups initiate relatively creative protests. Perhaps the most famous in recent years was Vicki Knafo, a single mother from Mitzpe Ramon in the Negev. When the finance minister at the time – Benjamin Netanyahu – slashed state assistance to women like her as part of broader budget cuts, Knafo decided to walk the 125 miles to Jerusalem and camp out in front of his office, although she packed up and went home after Netanyahu made several budgetary adjustments that in the end were seen as being mostly cosmetic.
Just about anything is fair game for local protesters. Two of the social sectors perhaps best known in the field are the ultra-Orthodox and the settlers. Thanks to the broad influence of rabbis, community leaders and efficient modes of internal communication, they can easily turn out tens of thousands of adherents. (The ultra-Orthodox have been known to do this within minutes.) The settlers’ chief opponents, Peace Now and other left-wing groups, have also been able to bring out tens and even hundreds of thousands of supporters, although in recent years, especially in the post-Oslo era, their demonstrations have been smaller and farther in between.
But there was a time when one issue – the army – was virtually sacrosanct. Then came the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Motti Ashkenazi, a reserve officer who performed admirably amid the chaos and uncertainty on the Egyptian front, came home and decided to stand each day outside the prime minister’s office. His message was that the performance of the generals and politicians had been anything but admirable. Others, including fellow reserve officers, soon joined him, and within three months a deeply embarrassed government resigned. From now on, no protests were out of bounds.
“Since 1973, peace or war has dominated our agenda. These are things one can certainly get riled up about,” Wolfsfeld tells The Report. “But something else is now going on. Overall, despite the ups and downs, the security situation has rarely been better. There are rockets and other attacks, but in most places we’re no longer afraid to go outside, unlike during the period of the bus bombings. So people are again looking elsewhere. Now, they have time to feel that no matter how much they work, how much they make an effort, they’re still going to have a bank overdraft.”
As observers debate the effect the recent cross-border attacks and rockets in Israel’s south will have on the tent cities and social justice rallies, Lehman-Wilzig points out that the tool of protest is likely to remain a key element of Israeli self-expression for a long time.
“In the bible, God calls the children of Israel ‘stiff-necked people’ for always protesting and complaining,” he says. “Today it’s the continuation of the political culture the Jews have been expressing for 3,000 years.”


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