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From The Revolt of the Public (Martin Gurri, 2018) pp138-42

The Israeli protesters attracted contradictory political fantasies because of the fuzziness of their definition. This repeated a pattern established in Egypt and Spain. The lack of leaders, programs, and organizational structure was if anything more pronounced. Those who spoke to the media on a regular basis, like Leef, were attractive and clever, but they lacked the power to command or decide, and they quarreled constantly among themselves. The question of whether to negotiate with the government divided the protesters. The goal of social justice — supposedly the North Star of the uprising — appeared to be as foggy a notion to them as to their media admirers.

Nevertheless, they unleashed a prodigious amount of kinetic energy, and for two months turned the very settled Israeli political landscape upside down. To explain this blind surge of pressure — to grasp the relation between events in Israel and my hypothesis of a 2011 phase change — I need to clarify who, exactly, the tent city protesters were, and what, in the end, they really wanted.

The who was plain enough. The protesters received support from the general public, and benefited from the active participation of some working-class elements — but this wasn’t them. They did not represent the Israeli population or its proletariat. Nearly all the organizers and most of the demonstrators came from Tel Aviv’s affluent, secular Ashkenazi families. This was a revolt of middle class hipsters, not of the downtrodden. Daphni Leef, for one, had been born into a well-to-do family, and partook of the generic leftist attitudes favored by the artistic community to which she belonged. She had refused to serve in the military, apparently out of sympathy with the Palestinians. In this, Leef differed from her prototype, the more conventional, politically ambivalent Wael Ghonim.

To judge by the groups which joined the tent protests, the people of the left played a more active part in Israel they had in Spain. In fact, some on the right have dismissed the entire episode as an exercise in manipulation, perpetrated by the leftist parties. This strikes me as unlikely for many reasons — not least that, if Israel’s moribund political left knew how to conjure up enormous crowds, it would have done so long before the summer of 2011. The left failed to insert any organizational strength or programmatic clarity into the protests. If leftists were abundant, the sectarian spirit of the people of the web was a far more powerful influence over the young rebels. Hence the carefree incoherence of their demands. To give just one example: proposals were floated to eliminate university tuition and increase benefits for the faculty. Even more than their Spanish counterparts, the young Israelis, as a class, had been engendered by the success of their country’s political and economic system. Israel had managed to avoid the worst of the 2008 crisis. Per capita GDP had climbed to over $31,000 in 2011 from $27,600 in 2008. At 5.6 percent, unemployment was not an issue. The majority of the demonstrators either held down jobs or fully expected to do so when they graduated. They were not a youth without a future. By some measures, inequality in Israel had increased, but the protesters’ demographic had been among the beneficiaries of this trend. Educated urbanites stood at the top of the pyramid. Arab Israelis and the ultra-Orthodox, with the highest poverty rates, languished at the bottom, and neither group participated in the protests of 2011. The people taking to the streets were the golden youth of Israel. That was the view from above and the view at ground level. Yet, like the indignados, they wished to cut away at their own roots. They wanted to be other than they were. They felt deeply, as one of them put it, that “Something in Israeli society is lacking; something is wrong with our collective priorities.” That refrain was repeated over and again. Something was missing from their lives. Something was wrong with their country. “This is not about housing,” a young journalist explained. “It is a welcomed attempt at patricide.” In the negation of their world and of themselves lay the beating heart of the revolt. The feeling infused life and urgency into the vague calls for social justice. By this phrase, the protesters meant many things. At the level of the system, it meant a repudiation of the Netanyahu government’s “swinish capitalism” and a reversal of market-oriented policies endorsed, over a decade, by the voters. Since 2001, the Israeli left had been decimated. The venerable Labor Party, which had midwifed the country during the epic years after its foundation, lay fractured and in ruins. The youngsters in Rothschild Boulevard often expressed a longing for the idealism of the old times. Although they liked to play at revolution — a mock guillotine went up in the tent compound — they imagined the future in terms of the past, and asked for nothing more radical than a return of the welfare state. Social justice also meant fixing the high cost of life in Tel Aviv. Daphni Leef’s grievance had been personal before it became political, but it resonated with large numbers of people of her age and class. The young demanded affordable housing. Students wanted lower tuition. Parents conducted a “stroller protest” against the cost of child care. Doctors went on strike for higher salaries. It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the zeal for “patricide” among this group was directly proportional to its loss of earning power.

From the tent city in Rothschild Boulevard came few calls for the elimination of the system, or democracy, or even capitalism of the non-swinish kind. But there were fantastic, almost messianic, expectations placed on the shoulders of modern government.

What Israel’s mutinous youth really wanted was this. They wanted the government to make things right. They wanted it to legislate a meaningful life for them in an egalitarian, fraternal, and, of course, affordable society. They had no plans to achieve this, or even a definition of what it meant, but it didn’t matter. That, too, was the government’s job — to listen to the politicized crowd, “the people” who demanded social justice, then somehow make it so. Israeli citizens, Leef asserted, “understand that we all deserve more; understand that they are allowed to demand more from the government.” ”

The contradiction between the free-market predilections of Netanyahu’s government and their own haphazard calls for state intervention didn’t trouble them overmuch. They weren’t revolutionaries, but neither did they make a fetish of representative democracy — and, at the height of their popularity, they believed Rothschild Boulevard could dictate terms to Jerusalem. “From now on, the young people will shape the government’s vision,” declared Itzik Shmuli, 31-year-old head of the National Students’ Union and one of Leef’s rivals as media face of the protests.

In the event, the government, though shaken by the magnitude of the re- volt, reacted more nimbly than it had done under similar circumstances in Spain. Three weeks after the tent city was first pitched, Netanyahu appointed a committee chaired by economics professor Manuel Trajtenberg, and tasked it with proposing, within a month, specific policy changes to address the grievances behind the protests. In an admission that the mechanisms of representative democracy had failed in this instance, the committee was asked to act as intermediary between the government and “different groups and sectors within the public.” That was code for the tent city people.

The recommendations of the Trajtenberg committee included housing subsidies, tax breaks for low income earners, and tax increases for the wealthy and businesses. These measures went against the grain of the Netanyahu government, but they were approved in October 2011 — a small, tentative step toward the welfare state desired by many of the young protesters. The size and volume of the demonstrations had represented a kind of political force majeure, to which the government responded because it felt it had no choice. Whether they were a fig leaf, as the protesters claimed, or sincere compromises, the Trajtenberg-inspired laws would never have received consideration if it hadn’t been for the tent city revolt. In this sense, they represented a triumph for the rebels.

That was not the way they saw it. To people with boundless faith in the powers of government, small bounded steps appeared like craven obstructionism. To those who hoped for personal transformation by means of radical politics, an offer of economic support looked like a bribe — and an insultingly tiny one at that. To a public animated by blanket negations, anything positive, anything specific, was experienced as a threat.

The demonstrators weren’t prepared to declare victory on any terms. That was true of the indignados in Spain, true also, with some local differences, of the crowd in Tahrir Square. It has proved impossible for the multiple revolts of 2011 to move beyond negation and reach an accommodation with reality. In Israel, the group around Daphni Leef refused outright to talk to government negotiators. They remained inflexible in their sectarian virtue. But even those who reached out to the government, like Schmuli and his students’ union, repudiated the outcome.

By then, the protests had passed their high-water mark. The last large demonstration was September 3. On October 3, police dismantled the Rothschild Boulevard tent city. Sporadic demonstrations continued into 2012, but with smaller crowds and diminished media attention. Political energy focused on the general elections called by Netanyahu for January 2013. Two prominent protesters — one of them Schmuli — ran on the Labor Party list and won seats in the Knesset. Their transformation from street revolutionaries to conventional politicians was a sign that the Israeli summer of 2011 had yielded up its soul to the Center.

The election results of 2013 lacked any clear connection to the events of 2011. Netanyahu’s party, Likud, lost seven seats but remained the most popular. Netanyahu himself kept the prime minister’s office. He may have been somewhat weakened by the protests, but, unlike Mubarak and Zapatero, he was not overthrown. The Labor Party gained a few seats, but remained stuck in third place.

Daphni Leef continued to thunder against swinish capitalists and the government that supported them. No longer an ordinary person, she had become a celebrity of sorts. The protests she started had worked out well for her, even if they failed to achieve their goal of social justice and left few marks on the Israeli electorate.

The protests also demonstrated that the powerful current of negation be- neath the inscrutable surface of the public required little provocation to break into large-scale political action. The Egyptian public had endured 30 years of Hosni Mubarak. The indignados at Puerta del Sol had suffered a loss of future prospects because of the severity of the economic crisis. In Israel, the public’s existential challenge to the established order came because Leef had found it unendurable to lengthen her commute.