So far as I'm aware, there hasn't been too much analysis in the British press of the significance of the massive protest movement in Israel - strange in itself, given how much attention is normally devoted to that country. In partial remedy of this I give some space here to two pieces, one by Amos Oz from yesterday's Times, the other by Michael Walzer, currently visiting Israel. As you will see there is a degree of overlap between their two analyses. An excerpt from Oz's column (£):
Israel has never been an egalitarian state. But in its heyday it was more egalitarian than most and looked after the poor and needy. Those who worked hard could make a modest but respectable living. The new immigrants, the refugees and the immigrant camp-dwellers all received public education, health services and housing. Young, poor Israel was a master social entrepreneur.
But all that has been destroyed in the past 30 years as the big-capital governments encouraged and inflamed the economic jungle laws of grab-as-grab-can. The protest washing over Israel's streets and squares today has long ceased to be merely one over housing distress. The heart of this protest is the affront and outrage over the Government's indifference to the people's suffering, the double standard against the working population and the destruction of social solidarity.
The tent cities spreading through Israel's actual cities, of the doctors marching for their patients, of the demonstrations and rallies are in themselves a delightful revival of mutual fraternity and commitment. After all, the first thing these demonstrators are saying, even before "social justice" and "down with the government" is: "we are brethren."
The resources for establishing social justice in Israel are located in three places: first, the billions that Israel has invested in the settlements, which are the greatest mistake in the state's history. Second, the mammoth sums channelled into the ultra-Orthodox yeshivas, where generations of ignorant bums grow, filled with contempt toward the state, its people and the 21st-century reality. And third, and perhaps foremost, the passionate support, by Binyamin Netanyahu's Government and its predecessors, of the enrichment of various tycoons and their cronies at the expense of the middle class and the poor.
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It [the protest] was born out of the devotion of hundreds and thousands of young people who swept in their wake the best people in the country.
And here is Michael Walzer, cheering on and figuring out in 'a time of unexpected hopefulness':
1. This is a rebellion of the mainstream against the privileged sectors - most important, though no one says this, against the settlers and the ultra-orthodox. Proportional representation makes it possible for relatively small groups of bloc voters to achieve disproportionate power, and these two groups, as key participants in (mostly) right-wing coalitions, have won benefits available to no one else. As one Haaretz columnist wrote, Netanyahu is a socialist in the occupied territories, where a fully developed welfare state exists, though only for the settlers. The settlers now include many ultra-orthodox Jews - who have been pulled into the nationalist camp by the gift of housing for their large and growing families in the territories...
2. This is the first uprising, anywhere in the world, against a successful neoliberal regime. Israel's macro-economy is doing very well (I make no predictions about what it will do tomorrow): unemployment is low, the shekel is strong, foreign investors are interested, there is a lot of entrepreneurial energy, economic growth is substantial and steady. At the same time, the damage that neoliberal policies do to communal solidarity, to welfare provision, and to the maintenance of the public sector is visible everywhere in the country (except in the occupied territories), and it is increasingly difficult for many families, with two wage-earners, to achieve and sustain a decent life. So this is a rebellion whose motto might be: It's the micro-economy, stupid! But its actual slogan is: The people demand social justice! There is no crisis here of state indebtedness, or of inflation, or of unemployment. The crisis has to do with inequality and injustice, and the people marching, who may well turn out to disagree about many things, seem to agree about that.
3. The uprising is a collective effort to escape the constraints and divisions of the Israeli debate about security, the nonexistent "peace process," and the occupation. When the emerging leaders of the uprising insist that their protest is "non-political," they mean that it's not about war and peace. They know, of course, that everything is connected, and that the difficulties they are experiencing are partly caused by massive state investment in the occupied territories. But they have their own dream of Zionist normality: they want to focus on their own lives and on the quality of domestic society...
4. This is a protest against what Israel has become, in the name of what it once was. It is an effort by the youngest Israelis to recapture an older, more egalitarian, more idealistic country that their parents lost. This is the view of the uprising that, with all my heart, I want to be the right one. Or one of the right ones, for no protest of this size can be so easily summed up...
Another place, another political atmosphere.