Netanyahu Serious

I’d only been back in Israel two days when, as the sun set on Shabbat on September 4^th I found myself in Tel Aviv with 300,000 protestors for social justice. Some way to get over jet lag – not!

We marched, or rather rambled, from Rothschild Boulevard where thousands of tents have filled the tree-shaded median strip for the last six weeks, down past Rabin’s memorial and on to meet the masses gathered in Hamedina Square, where speeches from student leaders and others are delivered – the cut-and-thrust periodically translated for me. The crowd is young but older than a month before when this same number had turned out and stunned commentators with its intention and passion. One friend Michal tells me people were weeping as they walked, overcome with the feeling that finally something was happening, and that friends and even brothers on the other side of politics were marching and saying “enough!”

Netanyahu’s government was caught on the back foot, scrambling to appear to be taking some action to unravel what people consider a rotten power structure operating between big business monopolies and government, undercutting quality of life for millions from the middle class down. Yet this equally large march was far less emotional, prompting another friend to say, “It’s so Israeli – the more extreme the emotion the faster they forget.” Was the energy for change flagging?

During these hot summer weeks the tent cities flourished with art and culture, Shabbat dinners on summer eves with wine and challah, peppered with fervent discussion. Not everyone has agreed, yet there has been no violence, and as one commentator put it, “the middle-class demonstrators {have really conducted} themselves like participants at an open-air Athenian forum”.

Tonight, while the red-decked communists are in force and the struggling Labor opposition, unions and students represented; this is a march of the people. There are countless special interest collectives, indicating how deep the dissent runs in Israeli society. At one point a large group of placard carrying psychiatrists march by! This week medical interns have quit their jobs. Once in the system, many professionals say, pay stagnates while prices continue their steep climb. Classrooms are overfull, and affordable housing rare as bacon on Dizengoff Street.

As one sign held up by a teenager wryly proclaimed  – “I am only thirteen, and I am worried!”

Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz recognized that after this summer of awakening "the last of the complacent decided that they, too, had to show up," Driven by students and fuelled by political and apolitical passions, Israel has risen up on the tail of the Arab Spring to its own promising (r)evolution. ‘Revolution’ is too strong a word for many, not wanting to attack the State itself. As one speaker put it “Israel is home, a home we are willing to die for – but will the government let us live?” As a social worker friend put it, “I just want to be able to pay my bills each month and have an occasional cappuccino in my local café. Is that too much to ask?”

Israel’s economy since the GFC has been, like Australia’s, the envy of many. With beyond 5% growth and about 5% unemployment the value-added and high-tech driven economy has sped forward. But the underlying structural issues have driven the middle classes, the ‘Young Turks’ of IT and others who have fuelled the economic success, to untenable financial situations.  Why?

Sixteen families and tycoons control half of Israel’s economy in elaborate pyramid structures that create one of the most concentrated oligarchies in the developed world. Price-fixing monopolies, shielded by high tariffs on imports, have meant, for example, that Israeli-made cottage cheese bought in San Francisco is cheaper than in Tel Aviv, by a ridiculous amount. It has meant too that when a lease expires tenants are faced with extraordinary hikes in rents, pricing them out of the market. Hence the tent city that has mushroomed these last weeks. And as one friend, until recently an IT expert with Hewlett Packard, told me, his superannuation funds were lent to and lost by a real estate company for investment in European property. The same wealthy Israeli owns both companies, using one as his personal bank for the other. My friend wonders where his money has really gone.

Since the protests began shares in some of these companies have fallen dramatically as investors wonder if the government will be compelled to take action against conglomerates. But the government is compromised by the lobbying power and in some cases direct political power of some. Michal tells me, “so many people finish working for the government on Monday and by Wednesday they are working for one of these companies that three days before they were supposedly policing.”

The claim is that the protest movement is grass roots driven, from middle class and student anger demanding social and economic reforms, lower prices from more market competition and government action to bolster affordable housing and education. But some people also say that there are other forces supporting and financing the protestors, less apolitical groups and individuals. Obviously the opportunity for a change at the ballot box is presenting itself here.

And then there are the rarely spoken issues that barely make it onto the protestors’ placards. One of those was delicately raised in an article on the weekend. By adulthood the next generation of ultra-orthodox children here will make up 30% of the population. They do not have to go into the army to defend the Holy Land as does every other boy and girl, nor do they have to work, but instead are supported by tax dollars. And then there are the settlements, 48% of which have been built with tax dollars over the last 10 years or so, compared to only 20% of affordable housing for everyone else. The impact of these economic burdens is being felt in the working and largely secular middle class. But orthodox religion here keeps Bibi’s government in power. Just like their ‘godparent’ the USA, Israel’s policies are disproportionally determined by big business monopolies and religious elements.

So, is the energy waning, and are the issues too complex? Do Israelis simply get passionate then lose interest? It remains to be seen. Certainly some protestors involved doubt that the naïveté that drove those first demonstrators, Daphne Leef and her fellow comrades, to the streets is enough to instigate real change in the face of an uncompromising government, a relatively successful economy that some think should not be tampered with, and perhaps a growing gap between the secular and the sectarian. One such activist, attorney Yaniv Moyal said, “Just because a child can yell that the emperor is naked doesn’t mean that same child has the ability to sew the emperor a new set of clothes.”

The government has established a committee led by respected economics professor Manuel Trajtenberg to study the protesters' demands. It is due to report later this month.

And, as an outsider, what I have also noticed is the lack of international reporting on these issues. As always the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and this week the serious hardening of Turkey’s relationship to Israel, and a severe turn in the ‘new’ Egypt against Israel, are obvious and important fodder for journalists, yet what is happening here may well signal a societal shift that will have profound ramifications on all the issues that riddle this region.

Israelis want change, and maybe that arrow will eventually hit a much wider target – peace in the Middle East.

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Postscript:

Several days after writing this we were walking up Rothschild and watched as police slapped warrants on tent after tent along the street. It occurred to me that the government had decided it was time now to move on the activists after this second march because of some of these issues I have written about here. The somewhat ill defined or contested goals of the protests; the perception that the issues are so complex that disillusionment can come easily, and thus a waning of enthusiasm in a country where passions rise high and die away with the next tide.

Driving down the coast last night a song comes on the radio – the words are telling, “DJ is not a name but if you say it out loud in Tel Aviv half the people will turn around.” This city, this country likes to party. In Tel Aviv certainly it is the best way to forget that Israelis, Jews, are a people long lost who have found themselves in this place after centuries of wandering and abuse, but are still and again surrounded by vilification and danger. It is ironic then that the necessary internal changes here the protests have vigorously exposed, may be unattainable when the focus is first and foremost on survival of the whole.

The protestors have agreed to take down the tents, but meanwhile after weeks of peaceful protest, violence did erupt outside city hall on Wednesday night resulting in 40 arrests.

Last night on Shabbat, one week after the march, at dinner in a town an hour south of Tel Aviv, our host, a television cameraman said, “Well unfortunately maybe it takes some violence for change to really happen.”

“The situation is hopeless, we must take the next step!”  Pablo Casals


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