Keep the hope alive

Hundreds of thousands of disgruntled Israelis have turned out for protests. Can organizers maintain the momentum in the face of growing security tension?

By LAWRENCE RIFKIN
social protest silent march 311 (photo credit: REUTERS/ Nir Elias)
social protest silent march 311
(photo credit: REUTERS/ Nir Elias)
FIVE WEEKS AFTER A HANDFUL of disgruntled young Tel Avivians pitched tents on Rothschild Boulevard and wound up igniting what’s become the broadest and most sustained blaze of social protests Israel has ever seen, red-hot borders in the south are now competing for the public’s attention.
Organizers say they have to be more creative than ever to maintain their momentum.
“We’re proceeding according to our gut instincts,” Martin Villar, spokesman for the Jerusalem protesters, tells The Jerusalem Report. “First, it’s not right to shout about social issues when people are in existential danger. Also, if you don’t get media coverage, there’s no reason to hold high-profile activities. We can wait before we resume our mass rallies, but if people are going to return, they have to know we’re here and that we’ve always been here.”
“The security situation is terrible right now,” adds protester Steffi Mizrahi, a 33- year-old recent college graduate. “But throughout Israel’s history, we’ve always put social issues on the back burner every time there’s a security issue. I think we are strong enough to handle both. And I think that the country will be even stronger if we feel secure about our social futures, and not only our physical futures.”
Following the terrorist attacks on a highway along the border with Egypt north of Eilat on August 18, in which eight Israelis were killed; the subsequent missile attacks on the Negev region and the IDF retaliatory attacks on the Gaza Strip; and in the context of the deteriorating relationship with Egypt, Jerusalem’s protest leaders canceled the rally they had planned for Saturday night. Many of them traveled to Tel Aviv instead to join in a silent march from Rothschild Boulevard – where the protest tents now number well over 250 – to the seashore about a mile away, where they held a quiet torchlight vigil and then a teach-in on social justice long into the night.
“We’re in a period of great uncertainty right now,” Villar says. “For the time being, our activities will be more low-key, such as seminars on various issues – including the need to defend ourselves while working toward social justice. And we’ve invited people from the tent city in Beersheba to comestay with us for as long as they’re in physical danger. That’s also social justice.”
BUT IT’S NOT JUST THE BORDER tensions that may slow down the protest movement.
The movement was successful enough to convince even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a diehard free-market capitalist, that he would have to accede to at least some of the protesters’ demands, and he appointed a committee to look into ways to close the country’s yawning social gaps. The protesters responded by establishing their own “shadow” committee, and even successfully petitioned the High Court of Justice against the official committee because Netanyahu did not appoint an Arab woman.
Now, both groups have begun to work. As these committees settle down into the routines of research and assessment, they may detract from the sense of urgency that has surrounded the protests and kept them rolling.
These events have brought the questions surrounding the protest into even starker relief: Can the movement, code named J14 for the day in July when the first tents went up on Rothschild out of disgust over stratospheric rents and mounting eviction orders in the name of urban renewal, maintain its momentum? Can it keep the ideas of social justice and a kinder welfare state on the table in a country where security has always been the trump card? And what’s more, have the protests led to unity within the Israeli public, or have they created deeper social divisions? After all, it’s quite clear that not every sector has been brought into the streets. Have they been able to break down the calcified divisions between right and left, which have until now related almost solely to the Israel-Arab conflict? And finally, what will the protests mean over time for Israel’s society, politics and economy? Will they lead to social change? And, if so, what kind?
ON AN EARLY AFTERNOON ON Rothschild Boulevard, exactly five weeks after July 14 and on the day of the terrorist attacks, most of the tent city’s “residents” are away, perhaps at work. A self-conscious peek through numerous halfopen flaps reveals sleeping bags and an assortment of clothes and personal items.
Many of the people walking through are apparently sightseers who hold out smart phones and take photos.
Around and above the tents, in addition to clotheslines hung with towels and underwear, are banners and signs, some clearly the product of print shops, others no more than just scribbles on cardboard. Many decry the housing situation, but just as many – if not more – pitch a litany of other issues ranging from the high cost of education to government plans to raise the retirement age for women and even rights for divorced dads.
It’s clear that people of every stripe and gripe have hitched their wagons to the housing cause.
“Unlike June’s cottage cheese boycott, which was based on inaction, our demonstration was very visible yet simple,” Stav Shafir, one of the original protesters, tells The Jerusalem Report. “Our tents spoke about the housing situation, but they also said ‘home’ and ‘life,’ and everything else that’s important to society. Within a week it was clear the tents really stood for social justice.”
Most of the Rothschild Boulevard tents have been pitched in neat rows, but some are grouped around small “courtyards” in which neighbors while away a humid afternoon, lolling on everything from blankets to the occasional living-room sofa. Several guitars can be heard, as can scales being played on a saxophone.
In one courtyard, a half-dozen young men and women – by now knowing how to identify an approaching journalist – interrupt a communal meal and break into the protests’ signal chant: “The nation demands social justice.” After a few rounds, the chant descends into an uncomfortable silence that elicits several giggles.
“So what do you think?” asks Eyal Peri, perhaps to pick up the rhythm. Sitting on a blanket, he sweeps around an outstretched arm. “Like our new home?” The pony-tailed Peri, 23 and a student, says he is tired of having to pay high rent to live in the city. “The city is where everything is,” he explains to The Report. “I might save a few shekels by living farther out, but the costs of travel would make it even more expensive. In the city I walk or ride my bike everywhere.”
Explaining the context of the protests, Peri continues, “There’s a shortage of apartments, and any new housing is being built by companies looking to make a profit. This brings up the price of second-hand apartments, as well as rents. If the government went back to building public housing and subsidizing mortgages, prices would come down.”
In another of the courtyards, 28-year-old Nadav Shvut, who works with youth at risk and is studying toward a masters degree in psychology, sits across a leather recliner reading a textbook.
“I live with three roommates in a threeroom apartment and pay NIS 1,600 [about $460],” he tells The Report. “That’s more than half of my take-home salary. It’s ridiculous.”
On a nearby park bench, a young blonde woman leans back to catch the sun. She won’t give her name but says she’s 26 and a manicurist, and that she knows why rents are so high, at least in Tel Aviv.
“It’s the Sudanese,” she says. She’s referring to the tens of thousands of migrants from several African countries, who in recent years have come overland via Egypt and snuck into the country, the vast majority ending up in the city to work as dishwashers or in other minimum-wage jobs. “They’ve filled up south Tel Aviv, where the apartments were once the cheapest. They sleep 10 to a room, allowing the landlords to demand higher rent. I can’t afford it anymore. I don’t want to sleep 10 to a room.”
Whoever is to blame, the common thread among the various protests is money. Not that there isn’t enough to go around – everyone knows that unlike so many other countries, on a macro-economic level, Israel has been doing well.
But in the eyes of an ever-growing number of citizens, the dismantling of the welfare state and the advent of privatization over the past three decades has channeled too much of this money to just a few wealthy tycoons who, to add insult to injury, have created cartels aimed at keeping salaries low and prices high.
AS OF MID-AUGUST, SOME 90 tent cities have sprouted throughout Israel, from Haifa and Beersheba to the smaller cities and towns on the periphery.
Unlike the Rothschild camp, few are filled with cool, mostly middle-class young adults – whom critics like hard-line Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and others in Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition have called “spoiled brats” and “sushi eaters.”
In fact, you needn’t go far to see the difference.
There are three tent cities in Tel Aviv alone. One is in the gritty Hatikva quarter – literally on the other side of the railroad tracks – where Julie Sofer, a 28-year-old single mother of three, sits on a worn sofa that’s been plunked down between two rows of tents under a stand of shady oaks in Hatikva Park. She takes another drag on her cigarette.
“My landlord just raised my rent from NIS 2,400 to NIS 3,000. I work 20 hours a week caring for an elderly woman – that’s more than I make. I’ve got kids. I need formula and diapers. Where will I get the money?” Sofer nods in the direction of a television set, kitchen table, low dresser and crib on the lawn outside one of the tents, making it clear she no longer lives in the apartment. “In a couple of weeks my daughter’s going to be starting second grade,” she says. “I don’t have enough money to buy her what she needs.”
Itzik and Dana Amsalem sit down on the sofa and join in the conversation. They have four children ranging in age from one to eight.
Neither Itzik nor Dana is employed. He’s a 43- year-old former drug addict who says he goes to the unemployment office every week only to be told there’s nothing available for him; she’s 32 and says she hasn’t had a job in years, what with eight pregnancies, four of which ended in miscarriages.
“Who will employ a pregnant woman?” she asks, not expecting an answer. Together they receive NIS 2,600 in welfare payments.
“Dana’s father left her his house,” Itzik tells The Report. “But the city demolished it three months ago, saying that additions had been made without the necessary permits.
We’ve been here since that day. A friend of mine at the municipality lets me use the park’s electricity and water. Since those kids set up their tents on Rothschild, others have come here to set up tents and they’ve been using the electricity and water, too.”
He claims there are 70 families living in the park, and a rough count of tents seems to bear this out. Maybe he and the others should go elsewhere to live, he’s told. Perhaps to a West Bank settlement. Housing prices are often lower there, and they’d surely be welcomed with open arms.
“Why should I have to go to a settlement in order to afford a house?” he asks. “Why should I have to move to the North or the South, where my cheap house might be hit by a rocket? I was born here and I want to stay here.”
ASIDE FROM THE TENTS, THERE seems to be little in common between Hatikva and Rothschild, which has become the national headquarters for the protests. Similarly, in Jerusalem, the tent dwellers downtown have much more in common with their co-protesters on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv than they do with the tenters in Sacher Park, less than two miles away, who would, in turn, probably feel more comfortable in Hatikva than in the downtown protest.
Yet there is indeed coordination. And that coordination is not just practical, says Jerusalem’s Mizrahi. “It’s ideological, too.
When we talk about social justice, we really do mean social justice for everyone. We mean a better future for everyone. Like free quality schooling, so that all of our kids will have an equal opportunity to succeed.”
In Hatikva Park, Max Karshov, 27, leans against a beige SUV, just past the first line of tents. On the rear of the vehicle is a placard with the Hebrew letter bet, which stands for bayit, or home. Taken from a children’s song about the alphabet, it has become the bestknown symbol of the protests.
“I take stuff back and forth between the local tent cities,” Karshov tells The Report.
“I just brought a draft of the schedule for a rally we’re planning.”
Itzik is looking the draft over, nodding his head. “Will we get transportation?” he asks Karshov. He’s told not to worry.
Karshov was born in Minsk and came to Israel when he was seven. His mother owns a lingerie shop, where he helps out. “It’s pretty boring there,” he says. “I heard about the tents the day the first ones appeared. I went over and offered my help. I have my mother’s SUV. It can carry a lot of supplies.”
He’s beginning to enjoy himself. “I’m getting to meet a lot of people. Like journalists.
In case you’re wondering, someday I want to be a Member of Knesset.” He wants to be part of Yisrael Beiteinu, which is Lieberman’s party, he says definitively. But when asked about Lieberman’s remarks, Karshov turns and points to Itzik. “Does he look like a sushi eater?” he asks sarcastically.
Itzik finishes going over the draft and, when asked about the Rothschild tent city, says he wishes it well – although the “real protest” is in Hatikva. “The families are here,” he says. “The children are here.
There’s been a lot less media interest in us, I guess because we’re less photogenic.
“The media aren’t interested in us,” he continues. “They come here, but not like on Rothschild. Besides, the papers and TV stations are all owned by the tycoons. You think the tycoons want to show people like us right now, when everyone is reminding them how rich they are?”
Many of those who have been critical of the social dissent that’s spread throughout Israel have also accused the protesters of having a hidden agenda. Op-ed and letters pages have been full of comments from right-wingers who say the protesters are really peaceniks out to topple Netanyahu, and from hardcore capitalists who call them socialists looking to bring back the tightly controlled (and often inequitable) welfare state Israel once was. But opinion polls have shown these critics to be in the minority. A Channel 10 poll taken two weeks into the protests showed 75 percent of the public being at least sympathetic to J14, if not outrightly behind it. A week later, Channel 10 said the figure had jumped to 88 percent.
One who has expressed sympathy, at least during some high-profile visits to tent cities, is Manuel Trajtenberg, the prominent economist who has been appointed by Netanyahu to head the official committee looking into the protesters’ complaints.
But Prof. Yossi Yonah of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, who together with former Bank of Israel deputy governor Avia Spivak is chairing the “shadow” committee working with the protesters, complains that the Trajtenberg panel is heavily weighted with representatives from government or state entities, such as the Prime Minister’s Office, the Treasury and the Bank of Israel.
And then there’s the matter of Trajtenberg himself. “He’s a very nice man, but he’s an exemplar of neo-liberalism,” Yonah tells The Report. “He believes in the expenditure rule, which determines the ratio between growth in government expenditures and growth of the economy. This policy aims to reduce government spending on services. We don’t think that the committee can bring about structural change.”
The Yonah-Spivak panel, which consists of 60 experts and academics from various disciplines, has staked out its own territory, making it clear that the two committees are likely to present vastly different findings.
“No one is suggesting a budget deficit. We are against it. We don’t want to end up like Greece,” Yonah says. “We believe in radical change in tax policies. There should be higher tax brackets for the wealthy and changes in inheritance taxes and on capital gains. Netanyahu’s trajectory has been to lower corporate taxes; we want them raised.
“Look what Warren Buffet wrote in ‘The New York Times’ the other day [about raising taxes for the super-rich],” Yonah says.
“Why not here?” The protests also have their shortcomings, particularly regarding who has not been taking part.
Small tent camps have been set up in Arab towns and villages, the protests have included Arab speakers, and at least one prominent Arab woman, educator Dr. Hala Espanioli, has been appointed to the shadow committee.
And now the official committee will have at least one Arab woman representative, too.
“But in general, the Israeli-Arab voice is absent from the social justice discourse,” says Sawsan Zaher, director for social, economic and education rights at Adalah, an advocacy group for Israel’s Arab citizens.
“One of the major reasons for this is that Arabs have a problem with the narrative. We think the problem is the occupation and the budgeting of money for the settlements and the army,” Zaher tells The Report. “Sadly, the social justice movement’s focus has been neutral about this issue. Many of the Jewish protesters are talking about tycoons... more than about the government and occupation.”
Zaher also blames what she says is the relative absence of an Arab voice in the country’s economy. “You won’t find any Arabs among the tycoons or in any major financial or economic positions,” she complains. “This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be there – it’s an opportunity for us to change social discourse.
But we see the problem as being institutionalized discrimination by the state, and not the tycoons.”
Also missing from the protests are the national-Zionist camp (see “A Moral Stand” on page 17) and the Russian immigrant community (see “The Russians Aren’t Coming” on page 14) and Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox.
The most obvious reason for the non-participation of the Haredim is probably gender modesty. But Adina Bar-Shalom, head of the Jerusalem Haredi College, daughter of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, a former Sephardi chief rabbi and spiritual leader of Shas, and a member of the shadow committee, points to deeper reasons.
“Haredim don’t want to have to apologize for studying Torah, for not going into the army,” she explains to The Report, referring to the acrimony between Haredim and primarily secular Israelis. “We believe that training Torah scholars is just as important as training scientists, but a lot of others don’t accept this.
In addition, there’s also the issue of government support for Haredi families, which angers many people. But Haredim choose to live in poverty. We believe social justice is not just money.”
There’s identification with the protesters, she adds, in the form of Haredim who donate money and food. “Individuals, yes,” she says, “but as a community, no.”
IF ANYTHING POSITIVE COMES out of the J14 movement, it will be a change in social awareness. And Gadi Wolfsfeld, a professor of political science and communications at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of “The Politics of Provocation,” believes that that change is on the way and so momentum is no longer terribly important.
“I don’t know how long this movement is going to last, but this is a watershed event.
Political discourse is going to have to change,” Wolfsfeld tells The Report. “There’s an important social correction going on. The mantra until now has been free market – ‘be like America,’ they said – but what you see is a real sense that we went too far. People are now going to be ashamed to talk about privatization. The language of brutal capitalism will be an embarrassment.”
Whatever the outcome, the new denizens of Rothschild Boulevard say they’re determined to effect social change and one of their tents perhaps best sums this sentiment up.
Like most of the others, it is a simple popframe tent, with arched external poles intersecting over the top, where a hook holds up a nylon roof tab. But its exterior, from top to bottom, was slathered with a layer of concrete that, now dry, has turned the tent into something that, at least symbolically, is a lot more permanent.
A hand-lettered page taped to the side says it all: “We’ll be here forever if we have to.”