The 14th of July of Daphni Leef: Class and social protest in Israel

Introduction

The day of 14 July 2011 saw the outburst of a wave of social protest that washed over Israel. One could not have picked a more fitting date for the eruption of a social protest, especially one attributed to the ‘middle class’. It was on the same date in 1789 that a crowd of Parisians broke into the Bastille, proclaiming ‘the third estate’ to be the French people. Yet, the social protest in Israel in the summer of 2011 is more akin to the 1968 Paris rebellion, than to the French Revolution, in which the regime stood firm, yet a change of a course began. Between July and September 2011, dozens of protest encampments sprung up throughout Israel, with tens to hundreds of thousands of people marching almost every Saturday, chanting the slogan ‘the people demand social justice’. The protest was unprecedented in Israel, not only in scale and intensity but also in the focus on socio-economic issues.

The Israeli protest was part of a series of global events. Europe (Spain, Greece, the United Kingdom) and South America (Chile) saw waves of protest against the upshots of the 2008 financial crisis. The Middle East also witnessed dramatic developments: a popular uprising in Tunisia led to the fleeing of its president, Egypt’s wave of mass protests led to the stepping-down of President Mubarak, the Libyan protest ended in the fall of Gaddafi’s dictatorship, and uprisings continued to simmer in Yemen, Syria, and other parts of the Arab world. Whereas in Western countries protests broke against the backdrop of an economic crisis, those in the Arab countries were directed against tyrannical and corrupt regimes. Although Israel was characterized by neither of these circumstances, it is not unlikely that this global climate helped stir its own, local protest wave. The literature on social movements and political sociology in general proposes several explanations for the wave of protests. Among those are the centrality of networks and the new social media (Castells 2015; DeLuca et al. 2012; Morell 2012; Valenzuela et al. 2012), transnationalization processes (Calhoun 2013; Castaneda 2012), crisis of legitimization and of representative democracy (Pickerill & Krinsky 2012; Pousadella 2013; Smith & Glidden 2012), the internal characteristics and dynamics of social movements (Bellei et al. 2014; Guzman-Concha 2012), and a reaction to the social transformations related to the neoliberal model – such as growing inequality – (Benski et al. 2013; Randall 2011). However, though researchers stress the structural role of neoliberalism and the global crisis of capitalism, and even call to ‘bring political economy back’ to study social movements (Benski et al. 2013: 548), few of the authors use class as an explanatory concept (Della Porta 2015; McNally 2013; Sotirakopoulos & Sotiropoulos 2013). Most of the social sciences’ research on Israel emphasize ethnicity, status, nationality, identity, gender, or coloniality as the central explanatory concepts, and focus mainly on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, or on the conflicts between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews. The seminal works on Israeli society and Israeli politics (Eizenstadt, Lisak and Horowitz, Semyonow and Lewin-Epstein, Kimmerling, Shapira, Yftachel, Levy, Shohat, Shenhav, Gordon, Ofir and Azoulay), while coming from very different theoretical traditions (from functionalism, through elitism, to post-colonialism and post-structuralism) have in common the centrality of the national conflict and of status and identity explanatory frameworks, and the relative marginal role of class as both focus of analysis and explanatory concept. While since the late 1980s, with the strengthening of post-structuralist approaches in the social sciences, class has been much less significant as an analytical concept in general, in the Israeli case the diminished role of class has predated its global decline, and has been attributed to what has been called Israel’s ‘exceptionality’, that is, its Labor-led nationalism. With a few noticeable exceptions (Swirski, Shalev and Levy, Peled and Shafir, Filc, Ram), class has been almost absent from any serious analysis of Israeli society. Thus, the literature on the Israeli social protest has also explained its strengths and failures through concepts such as generation (Herzog 2013), nationalism (Gordon 2012; Monterescu & Shaindlinger 2013), ethnicity (Misgav 2013; Shenhav 2013), social movement analysis (Alimi 2012), or political crisis (Talshir 2014). More in line with the need to ‘bring back class’, are Grinberg’s (2013) and Rosenhek and Shalev’s (2013) combination of class and generation explanations. While it is clear that the Israeli society and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict provide an excellent example of the limitations of class as the sole explanatory instrument, we consider that the social protest of 2011 can be fully understood only through a class and ethno-class perspective, and it therefore necessitates the return of ‘class’, both as a social phenomenon and as a theoretical concept. We join in these perspective very recent calls by students of social protest, to go beyond the confines of the ‘social movements’ paradigm and to re-consider the structural effects of capitalism and the dynamics of class relations as prime vectors of social historical change (Barker et al. 2013). Della Porta (2015), for example, defines the later wave of protest as ‘anti-austerity movement’, and distinguishes it from the new social movements of the 1990s and from the global justice movements of the beginning of the 2000s.

Following these calls, this article attempts to analyze the 2011 social protest using a class perspective, while addressing the following questions:

The article proposes the following theses in reply to these questions. The first thesis is that the social category that launched and led the protest was a particular sector of the middle class – the ‘bohemian-bourgeoisie’ sector. The leaders of the protest represented the more educated and less affluent section of the middle class, and gave expression to that strata’s perceived sense of increasing threat to its social welfare. This development was perceived as a violation on the part of the state of the unwritten ‘republican contract’, according to which members of the middle class play the role of producers (by participating in the workforce and paying taxes), and of warriors (through mandatory military service and reserve service), while the state in return is expected to guarantee their welfare and social security. The middle class considered that not only had the state violated the contract but also that, under Prime Minister Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition, the state showed generosity toward those sectors regarded by the middle class as non-producers (settlers in Israel’s Occupied Territories) or as non-warriors (the ultra-orthodox Jews who dodge the universal military draft). The effect of the protest stemmed, however, from the fact that the middle class was joined by other social groups, characterized by different geographical, class, and ethnic characteristics, in a way that allowed for the construction (at least momentarily) of ‘the people’ as a new political subject. At the same time, however, some sectors of the population felt alienated from the protest, including the ultra-orthodox, religious nationalists, immigrants from the former Soviet Union, as well as unionized workers, and Palestinian citizens. All in all, ‘class’ was here entangled with ‘ethnicity’, in a way we explain toward the end of the article.

Our second thesis is that the protest was the first large-scale display of class resistance to the post-Fordist, neoliberal socio-economic system that had taken root in Israel since 1985. In the past quarter century, Israel has undergone a neoliberal restructuring, which included the privatization of public resources, the contraction of welfare state services, and a change in wealth distribution, placing it at the top of the developed countries’ inequality ladder. The protest marks a shift in Israel’s ‘class coalition’. Whereas up till recently the middle-class lent its unreserved support to the neoliberal transformation, jointly led by the financial and political elites, parts of that class seemed to be shifting toward a new alliance together with various disempowered groups against the ‘coalition of wealth’.

The third thesis is that the protest manifested the emergence of a new kind of ‘post-postpostmodern’ politics: this, in response to both the representation crisis of the modern political system, and to the failure of postmodern politics to address socio-economic concerns. The protest adopted an ‘a-political’ stance; it took place in encampments, demonstrations, and through direct democracy practices – channels that are outside the conventional modern political system of parties, parliaments, and trade unions. The protest also by-passed the postmodern politics of sectional affiliations and identities. Instead, it sought to establish out of different sectors and identities a ‘people’, unified on the basis of common demands of material distribution. One can view the protest as forming – at least for a short while – a new ‘collective subject’: ‘the people’ in the universalist, democratic sense, encompassing the middle and lower classes around the demand for social justice.

We shall finally argue, in the conclusion, that in order to understand the emergence, as well as the limitations of the 2011 protest, the analysis must incorporate a class and ethno-class non-essentialist perspective.

Between July and October 2011: A summer of protest

The chain of events began in early July, when film student Daphni Leef decided to protest the rising rent prices in Tel Aviv, using her Facebook page to invite people to join her in establishing a protest encampment. The next day saw the first tents popping up on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, which gradually expanded to other sites. Within a month, 2,350 tents were set up in 41 locations throughout the country. Several days after the beginning of the protest, the first demonstration took place in Tel Aviv. This marked the beginning of a mounting wave of demonstrations including ones of particular groups from both middle class and lower class, such as cab drivers, the elderly, disabled people, single mothers, the homeless, policemen’s wives, farmers, temporary workers, young parents and more. Speakers at these events included popular leaders and invited public figures – but not politicians or state officials.

The protests were preceded by several local and global events. Shortly before the first encampment was set up, a Facebook group of over 100,000 users formed in protest of the high price of the popular ‘Cottage Cheese’ – later developing into a public campaign against retail chain prices of basic products in general. This precedent marked the nature of the entire protest wave, which was marked by consumers concerns. The slogan ‘social justice’ signified a demand for lower prices of goods and services, rather than traditional working-class demands for better pay and working conditions. This consumer protest joined forces with an already existing popular protest against the disproportionate power of economic ‘tycoons’, and the increasingly centralized nature of the Israeli private sector.

The demonstrations reached their peak on 3 September 2011, with some 400,000 people marching throughout the country, 300,000 of which in Tel Aviv. This was by every estimate the single, largest demonstration ever held in Israel – certainly the largest dedicated to social issues. Yet, following this demonstration, the encampments were disbanded, with only a handful of homeless people remaining in them for a while until they were evacuated as well. The swiftness with which the protest disappeared without trace was no less remarkable than its surprising outbreak some 100 days before.

Between the top and the bottom: The politics of the middle class

The protest itself provided an answer to the question ‘whose protest was this?’ through its main slogan: ‘The people demand social justice’. In Israel, the term ‘people’ (Hebrew: Am) commonly refers to the Jewish or Jewish-Israeli ethno-cultural national community (similar to terms like Volk or ethnos). Terms such as ‘the people of Israel’ and ‘the Jewish people’ are key concepts in Zionist and Israeli identity, and in the state’s law. ¹ The use of ‘people’ in the summer 2011 protest, however, was new and different. It pointed to the unity and popular nature of ‘the entire people’, understood as standing in contrast to the financial and political elites: ‘the people’ not as an ethno-national unity but as a broad popular class alliance, opposed to the interests of the upper class, with the demand for social justice being the common denominator of this popular unity.

The spread of protest encampments beyond Israel’s central city of Tel Aviv, together with the participation of disempowered groups, residents of the periphery, and to a lesser extent, Arab citizens, legitimized the protestors to speak on behalf of ‘the people’. Stav Shaffir, one of the prominent young protest leaders, expressed this by saying, ‘Today, a homeless woman from Jerusalem joined; [and] people from Eilat [a remote southern city]; people are coming from all over the country. This is everybody’s protest. We’re all in the same boat’. A survey taken in early August 2011 supports the hypothesis that the protest injected broad meaning into the signifier ‘people’, revealing an outstanding 88% support for the protest. ²

This self-image notwithstanding, the protest also reproduced the already existing socio-political cleavages of Israeli society. Not ‘everybody’ participated in – nor supported – the protest to the same degree. The protest was identified from the start as a ‘middle class’ protest. It indeed expressed the realization that social anxiety and economic distress were now also spreading to the middle class, whose typical apathy and sense of distinctness were consequently shaken. ³ Characterizing these events as a middle-class protest requires, however, two qualifications. First, the reference is made to the particular fraction of the middle class, from which the protest leaders emerged: the younger, better-educated, yet less wealthy, fraction. Second, the middle class is not a well-defined and closed sector, but rather a broad strand in Israeli society, that incorporates various sub-categories located both at the center and the periphery.

The main characteristic of the protest’s core group can be clearly distinguished. They were predominantly young women and men, aged 25–35 years, singles, Tel Aviv residents, high-school graduates, communication or liberal arts university students, and digitally literate. It was a group that belongs to what is labeled ‘bourgeois bohemians’ or the ‘bobo class’ (Brooks 2000; Florida 2002). In Bourdieuian status-analysis terms, this group is characterized by high cultural capital on the one hand, and medium to low material capital, on the other hand; in other words, it is the ‘lower fraction of the high class’ (Bourdieu 1995 [1984]).

This initial kernel was joined by representatives of several organized groups that contributed significantly to the protest in terms of both numbers and logistics. The first of these was the national student association – students typically being part of the middle class as well. Another group that joined and had an impact on the preliminary formulations of the protest’s demands was Dror Yisrael – a movement which upholds the tradition of Israel’s labor movement, identified with Zionism, pioneering, and communalism. It represents the social sector characterized by sociologist Baruch Kimmerling (2001) as Ashkenazi (Jews of European origin), secular, veteran, socialist, and nationalist. To summarize, the initial base of the protest consisted of three groups: Tel Aviv bourgeois-bohemians, students, and representatives of the Ashkenazi-secular-nationalist mainstream – which together affirm the middle-class image of the protest. ⁴

And yet, as mentioned, the ‘middle class’ did not march alone; it was joined by other social groups from various classes (homeless people, slum residents), ethnic backgrounds (Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, work immigrants, and asylum seekers), and localities (periphery residents from Israel’s northern and southern regions). It should be pointed out that women played a very central role in the protest, both in the leading and the popular ranks. In this sense, the reference of the protest to ‘the people’ offered an alternative not only to Israel’s homogenizing nationalistic discourse but also to the sectorial discourse of identity-politics, predominant since the 1990s (a discourse that is intellectually anchored in postmodern and postcolonial approaches). This shift away from identity-politics was especially prominent vis-à-vis Israel’s postcolonial Mizrahi (Oriental-Jewish) discourse that highlights discrimination against Jews of Oriental descent in Israel. The protest was characterized by lack of reference to the ethnic question, which seemed to be regarded as ‘a thing of the past’, and as divisive with respect to common, cross-ethnic, social interests.

At the same time, support for the protest was not uniformly distributed across different social and political circles. Representatives of various Mizrahi publics from both the Left and the Right expressed reservations, and senior figures of the Shas and Likud Right-wing parties referred to the protest in derogatory terms such as ‘spoiled rich kids’ (‘Tzfonbonim’). Nevertheless, Mizrachi activists were also among the protesters, certainly in peripheral areas, as well as among the national leadership. ⁵

Palestinian citizens of Israel – the most excluded, disenfranchised, and poor sector of Israeli society – were ambivalent about the protest. On the one hand, this public did participate in the protest. Encampments were set up in several Israeli–Palestinian towns and in the main Rothschild encampment a tent labeled ‘1948’ – the year of the first Arab–Israeli war – was set up by Arab social activists from Jaffa. In the Be’er Sheva encampment was a tent of the Bedouin ‘unrecognized’ settlement of Al-Araqeeb village, recently destroyed by the security forces. Most of the major demonstrations included Palestinian–Israeli speakers, who also participated in the public expert-committees that were established. At the same time, however, the majority of Israel’s Arab population felt disconnected from the protest – most likely due to their sense of cultural and national alienation. ⁶

Even though one of the mottos of the protest was ‘Neither Left nor Right: Solidarity above all’, and although its leadership continuously emphasized that the protest was ‘a-political’, the attitudes toward it were nonetheless split along established political lines. Opinion polls clearly show support for the protest declining as one moves from Left to Right on the political scale. In a survey from early October 2011, 23% of the public said they would vote for a new party headed by the protest’s leaders, with 46% support among voters of the central or center-left Labor party, and only 14% support among the rightist Yisrael Beiteinu party.

Three significant social sectors of clear Right-wing leaning did not take part in the protests: the ultra-orthodox, the religious-nationalist and the ‘Russians’ (common name for former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) immigrants).

The ultra-orthodox sector, which suffers from severe economic and housing distress, was completely absent from the protest, with few exceptions. Though it relies on state support more than any other sector, its relations with the state are clientelistic, and it tends not to participate in public sphere events with the secular public. Moreover, many of the ultra-orthodox felt that the protesters blamed them as responsible for the socio-economic burden.

The religious-national public suspected the political motivations behind the protest, fearing that calls for social justice and welfare state policy would translate into the demand to halt the channeling of national resources to the settlements in the West Bank: a call that the Left raises occasionally under the heading of ‘the price of the occupation’ (Gutwein 2004; Swirski 2005b).

As for former USSR immigrants, this public generally exhibited reservations about the protest. One explanation for this lies in this public’s disdain for anything ‘socialist’. Yet, another explanation is the sense of distance between this sector and that of ‘mainstream’, bohemian Tel-Avivian, who were identified with the protest.

The general non-participation in the protest of certain identity categories – Mizrahim, Orthodox Jews, Russian immigrants, and Palestinians – provides an explanation to the relative absence of the ‘lower classes’ from the protest, and to the actuality and image of a ‘middle class’ event that stuck to it. In Israel, social stratification is based on ethno-classes, which is a high coalescence between low socio-economic status and belonging to these very same categories.

Yet another group that did not take part in the protest consisted of both ‘blue collar’ and ‘white collar’ organized workers. Although the participants in the encampments and demonstrations were themselves waged employees, the trade unions were largely absent. ⁷ As stated, this was essentially not a working class protest, but rather one of a loose alliance between the middle class and the lower classes in their role as (frustrated) consumers, raising demands against the prices of food, housing, services, and so on. Even as things progressed, and the general call for ‘social justice’ crystallized into specific demands, emphasis was placed on the distributive aspect of the state budget, rather than on patterns of production and employment.

With this social snapshot in mind, it would indeed appear that ‘the people’ stood for ‘the people in the middle’, and that more than anything, the protest signified a shift in middle-class politics. For the past 25 years in Israel, this class would join forces with the neoliberal revolution headed by the financial elite. Israel’s young start-up entrepreneurs, together with the so-called ‘finance boys’ (of the ministry of finance) and a cadre of economic professors, are but a few examples of this. This class lent its support to cutting down welfare state policies, failing to realize that it is itself a beneficiary of welfare services. Once welfare cutbacks took place, this class found itself climbing a downward-moving escalator, while its members were working harder, they were less and less able to purchase services they used to take for granted as basic rights, such as health and education. Part of this class began to realize that, while it went on to perform its part in the ‘republican contract’ – by serving in the military and paying taxes – the republic failed to pay its dues.

The protest was thus an attempt (and not necessarily a successful one) to bring about a change in Israel’s ‘class coalition’: an attempt by parts of the middle class to move away from the coalition with the financial elite, and to form a new coalition with the lower classes, based on a politics that might be labeled post-postpostmodern – one that attempts to generate social solidarity across sectorial demarcation lines.

Between 1985 and 2011: Neoliberalism and its social outcome

What were the causes for the protest and what were its aims? In a preliminary document, its leaders presented a long series of demands aimed at increasing welfare and narrowing social gaps, yet they lacked any articulated reference to existing social structures or government policies. Later, when the protest enlisted the aid of volunteer teams of experts, the demands were somewhat systemized (Yonah & Spivak 2012). Yet, the demands were never ‘radical’ in nature but rather relied on a reformist Keynesian/social democratic approach.

With that said, the protest was the first large-scale display of class resistance to the post-Fordist, neoliberal system, whose outcome was, on the one hand, economic growth and prosperity, and on the other hand, social polarization and distress, which brings us to the question of the social and economic conditions for the outbreak of the protest.

Pre-1985 Israel was a developmental state: one in which the government played a leading role in social and economic development. After gaining state-independence, the collectivist tendencies of Israel’s pre-state era evolved into a ‘mixed’ national economy, consisting of an extended public sector and a limited private one. This model, in which the appropriation of space and unequal land and planning policies played a central role, resulted in the constitution of an ethno-class structure in which the upper level was mainly occupied by Ashkenazim, followed by an intermediate Mizrahi stratum, and a lower one, mainly Palestinian Arab (Swirski 1989; Yiftachel 2000b).

The first Likud government of 1977 launched a contradictory socio-economic policy, involving financial liberalization and populist distributive measures, which resulted in a severe inflation crisis. The 1985 Likud–Labor coalition responded with an ‘Economic Stabilization Plan’, which effectively turned Israel’s market from Fordist (industry-based and nationally oriented) to post-Fordist (finance-based and globally oriented), and its economic policy from Keynesian (one in which the government plans, intervenes, and redistributes) to neoliberal (narrowing the role of the government, and strengthening a corporation-driven ‘free market’; Filc & Ram 2004; Ram 2008). For the first time since 1985, the summer 2011 protests erected a social barrier in the path of this ‘new economy’.

Under the new regime, the finance elite gained significant power over and above the state and the rest of the population. This change in the balance of class power involved two interrelated processes, which constitute the supportive pillars of Israel’s neoliberal economic policy since the 1980s: privatization and centralization. The first dismantles the public resources for the generation and distribution of wealth, while the second transfers control over these resources to the hands of a narrow financial elite. A unique aspect of this process in the Israeli context was the privatization of companies owned by the Histadrut, which, on top of being a trade union, was also the owner of such giants (in Israeli terms) as Bank Ha’Poalim and the Koor mega-corporation. These processes, along with structural changes to labor relations, diminished the power of unionized workers. A direct route led from privatization to centralization, as the first generated a public vacuum that served as a historic opportunity for the emergence of a new financial elite – a vacuum that was filled not with a ‘free market’ but rather with a centralized one. How centralized, exactly, is the Israeli market? According to a Bank of Israel study, some 20 business groups, mostly family owned, control about half of the financial market through pyramid structures, making up one of the highest degrees of market centralization in the Western world (Bank of Israel 2010: 155–160; Kosenko 2008).

One of the main outcomes of privatization and centralization is the increased ‘flexibility’ of labor relations and production processes. The new employment conditions apply primarily and in their most extreme form to two groups – migrant workers and contingent workers – yet, they contaminate the main labor market. Israel is a world leader in these two employment categories: estimates regarding the number of contingent employees range from 250,000 to 300,000, constituting some 10% of the workforce, compared to an average 1.5% in other developed countries (Weisberg and Bior 2011). The official number of migrant workers is 211,000 (Sheps 2011).

Simultaneously, Israel saw in the 1980s a consumer revolution, led by the opening of shopping malls and brand chain stores. Israel is placed fourth worldwide in terms of commercial real estate area per capita (31 m²; Gilboa 2008: 11) – a fact that was apparent in the nature of the 2011 protest, as we mentioned above.

In line with the abovementioned developments, Israeli governments, since the 1980s, have adopted policies that have narrowed social services and extended distributive inequality. One expression of this inequality-promoting policy is the low level of direct taxation versus the high level of indirect taxation. Israel’s direct taxation constitutes 17.5% of the gross domestic product (GDP; vs 22.3% in other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)-member countries, ranking it 27 out of 31). ⁸ Indirect taxation (which is socially regressive), on the other hand, is relatively high, constituting about 16.2% of the GDP (compared to an OECD average of 10.2%). Another factor contributing to inequality and to the decline in social services are cuts in social expenses out of the national budget. Social expenditure constituted 18.5% of the 2001 national budget and only 15.5% of the 2007 budget (significantly lower than other OECD countries, where it averages 19.3%; OECD 2010: Table 2).

These figures have direct bearing on the living conditions of the entire population. Wealth is less equally distributed, with immense capital accumulating at the top, and poverty spreading through the bottom. In between, members of the middle class are waging a battle for survival, crushed under the attempt to maintain the degree of social services they grew accustomed to, by making out-of-pocket payments for complementary ‘gray’ services or for altogether-privatized alternatives, primarily in education, health, and housing. The 2011 protest was clearly a response to this condition.

As mentioned, a clear outcome of the post-Fordist and neoliberal transformation was the simultaneous increase in growth and inequality. In 2010, Israel’s GDP reached US$218 billion. GDP per capita was US$28.8 thousand (in purchasing power), which is about 84% of the OECD average (Bank of Israel 2010: 34) and the 24th rank in the world index (Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) 2010: Table 28:2). In the worldwide Human Development Index, Israel reached the even higher 15th position (United Nations Development Program (UNDP) 2011: Table 1). This could have been a mark of distinction, were it not for the social poverty generated by the unequal distribution of wealth. Israel’s economic success thus serves to highlight its social failure. As mentioned, the reason for this incongruity between economic affluence and social misery lies in the new imbalance of class power, and the rise of the financial elite. The overall result was a steep rise in inequality (with a Gini coefficient of 0.378 – second-highest among developed countries after the United States; CBS 2010: 119). ⁹

Privatization and centralization processes, together with increased income inequalities, which were caused, on the one hand, by workers deunionization, and on the other hand, by government taxation and welfare policies, led to the formation of a new wealth pyramid, constructed by a narrow layer of opulent financial elite, consisting of the top income decile; a middle layer, consisting of eighth and ninth deciles; and a low layer, consisting of the seventh decile and below, which includes the lower-middle class, low-income households, and the poor. ¹⁰

Among wage earners, the top decile acquires 41.4% of the total income, the middle eighth and ninth deciles 27.3%, and the lower seventh decile and below 31.3%. Israel has developed into a ‘one-third society’, in which the top third appropriates two-thirds of the national wealth. The 2011 protests sounded the voice of these other two-thirds, disappointed from the unfulfilled promise of neoliberalism to bring about a higher standard of life for everyone, and blaming the state for breaching its contract with them.

Post-postmodern politics: Beyond the modern and the postmodern

We saw that the structural reasons behind the protest include the new class configuration that resulted from the post-Fordist turn and neoliberal restructuring, which has been taking place since 1985, together with the state’s violation of the ‘republican contract’ with its citizens. But, what accounts for the ‘form’ of the protest? Why has it taken place in the streets rather than through political channels? Why the extra-parliamentary measures of encampments and protests rather than party-based representation? Why was an ‘a-political’ language used? Behind these lie a deep crisis of representation and a general sense of mistrust with respect to the political system.

One of the clear characteristics of the protest was its self-definition as ‘non-political’ or ‘a-political’. Its speakers adamantly avoided identifying themselves with any political party or associating with politicians, and were especially careful to deny allegiance to the Left (even though some of them were aligned with the Left). In Israeli discourse, to be ‘a-political’ means first and foremost not to take a stand on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the future of the occupied territories – the very same issue with respect to which the Left/Right division of the political map is drawn. The protestors (with the exception of small elements from the organized Left) avoided this divisive issue in order to preserve the unified image of ‘the people’. Even the central demand for a change of economic and social priorities was presented as ‘a-political’.

This crisis of representation and distrust of politics were also caused in part by the neoliberal turn. The support of the basic neoliberal agenda by all parties blurred the distinctions between them, making the choice among them seems redundant. At the same time, different opinions with respect to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict also blurred, with the general acceptance of the thesis that ‘there is no partner for peace’. The trend toward blurry political distinctions increased with the formation of centrist parties (such as Kadima and later Yesh Atid), in which leaders of the former Left and Right joined forces around vague slogans, and with the formation of coalitions between parties of allegedly polar ideologies.

A crisis of representation can be defined as a condition of wide dissatisfaction with the forms and quality of democratic representation, and a general sense among the public that the political system does not reflect its interests, nor offers solutions to its woes (Adams 2001). In Israel and elsewhere, this crisis is also the product of the externalization of certain political functions outside the political system, including the resolution of conflicts through the judiciary system (primarily the Israeli High Court of Justice), and economic policy-making through professional bodies (the central bank, the ministry of finance). Within the political system itself, the crisis is manifested in the emptying of political frameworks of any content beyond sheer electoral competition, in the contingency and fast turnover of such frameworks, and in the declining loyalty to them and even their abandonment. ¹¹ According to surveys, political parties lie at the bottom of the scale of public trust in political institutions, enjoying only 25% public trust, with 80% of the public placing parties and politicians at the top of the corruption scale. Party membership dropped from some 20% in the 1960s to 6% in the 2000s, with voter turnout dropping from a high figure of 85% to 60% in recent years (Arian et al. 2006).

This crisis also accounts for the strengthening of civil society organizations, established as intermediaries between society and the state. Between 1991 and 2005, an average of 1,700 new such organizations were registered annually (Ben Eliezer, Arian 2008), with the portion of those addressing social welfare issues increasing significantly to 5.5% (Kaufman and Gidron 2006). However, these organizations too failed to serve as an adequate countermeasure to the crisis of representation, due to internal processes of professionalization, which came at the expense of representation (Saurugger 2006), and to their focusing on specific issues.

As mentioned, the crisis of representation is not unique to Israel. Whereas under the modern-Fordist political system, parties formulated ideologies and represented different publics with distinct and relatively defined interests, with class playing a significant role in party affiliation, under the current post-Fordist/postmodern political system, ideological affiliations and interest groups have disintegrated into aggregations of individuals or into communal clusters. The result of this is twofold: On one level, we see the formation of a new, individualistically oriented politics, characteristic of the middle class, whose identity is strongly linked to consumer culture, thus also tending to generate consumerist-like swing votes; on a second level, we see the formation of communal politics, characteristic of economically and educationally disempowered groups, who cluster around identities. Israel’s political culture saw a far-reaching transformation along these lines: a turn form a modernist public sphere, in which interests (among those also class interests) and ideas form into parties, to a postmodern one, in which ‘candidates’ engage in a commercialized competition for swing votes, while large political parties ‘represent’ volatile mass electorate, and small ones are associated with specific communities.

The limitations of representation were even more severe in the case of Israel, in light of the gap between the unequivocal adoption of neoliberal principles by the political and professional system, and the widespread public expectations regarding the role and duty of the state in social matters. Even after a long period of neoliberal policy, the Israeli public still expects the state to assume responsibility over its citizens and to supply them with a wide base of social services in areas such as education, health, and to some degree housing (Shalev 2007). ¹²

These expectations are anchored in the aforementioned, unwritten ‘republican contract’ between state and citizens, in which the former places high demands on the latter, primarily in the area of national security (the demand to give away several years of their lives for military service, and to place themselves at risk in times of war). This contract applies primarily – both in reality and in consciousness – to the middle class. The government-commissioned Trachtenberg Report pointed to the state’s violation of this contract as the primary (and in the eyes of its writers, justified) reason for the outbreak of the 2011 protests. The Bank of Israel similarly described the middle class as ‘those whom we often say bear most of the social, economic, and security burden, yet feel that their quality of life and the services they get from the state are declining’ (Bank of Israel 2012; Levi 2007; Peled & Shafir 2002; Trachtenberg Committee 2011).

It is thus not surprising that in recent years the sense of social crisis found varied expressions precisely outside mainstream politics. Struggles taking place outside the political system have demonstrated how parties lost their traditional role as mediators between citizens and state, leaving the political arena wide open for mediatized and commercialized competition on the one hand, and for pre-political loyalties (‘identities’) on the other hand. On top of this, in line with the postmodern, post-materialist spirit of recent decades, questions regarding production and distribution were of little interest in the eyes of intellectual and media elites. In the eyes of the administrative elite, these are regarded as technical questions that require expert knowledge, and which have to be isolated from outside interference by the public or even by politicians. Thus, when material distress is raised, and with it the need for a public articulation of socio-economic issues, no suitable political channels are available for voicing and processing such matters. The crisis of representation led, on the one hand, to the protest expressing itself via extra-establishment channels, using an a-political and even anti-political language, and on the other hand, to the difficulty to translate the protest into sustained political action and a comprehensive political program. So in the last analysis, the protest was more a manifestation of accumulated distress than of articulated ideology. The initial acts of it were mere expressions of economic stress, and when strained to define their demands, the protesters resorted to ad-hoc committees manned by volunteer experts, who more or less had to ‘invent’ a program. The end result was a general plea for greater state responsibility over social welfare, market regulation and distributive policies, which was the dominant claim, combined with demands for decentralization of the economy and consumer oriented policies.

Because of the luck of institutions that combined a coherent socialist or social democratic agenda with popular appeal (whether political parties or trade unions), when national parliamentary elections took place in 2013 and again in 2015, the protest was over and done with and some of its leftover energies were channeled to the Labor party and to Yesh Atid Party – the former with a claim to a social democratic past, the later with a claim for social justice for the middle class in the future and a neoliberal actualization of the ‘republican contract’; yet, none of the parties could or would deliver on its electoral promises.

One should also note, however, that the new ‘a-political politics’ was expressed not only in the dismay from conventional politics and its institutions (parties, parliament, etc.) but also in a new, creative, direct and performative politics, and in the attempt to turn the public sphere truly public. It seemed that, at least within the encampments, the protest gave birth to new forms of participatory democracy. Ongoing discussions were held about the aims of the protest, its organization, decision-making processes, and so on. The right to voice one’s opinion and to vote in these discussions stemmed from the face-to-face, joint presence of people, in an attempt to reach consensual (as opposed to majority-based) resolutions. This ‘circle culture’, which may have relied on the precedent of the Spanish protests earlier that summer, was also an expression of the postmodern, new-age ‘get-together’ culture, common among young Israelis, with its emphasis on individuals, on their day-to-day lives, and on etiquette-free directness between them (Simchai 2009: 108–111). Artists, singers, actors, professors, students, and other participants gathered together in circles to hold penetrating discussions of social and political matters, to watch relevant films, listen to various kinds of protest music, dance, eat, drink, smoke, and pray – each according to their taste and faith. A rare moment of tolerance for Israeli society, Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard turned into a display of inclusion, bringing together groups and associations very different from each other, including students, Zionist youth movements, the communist party, Palestinian activists, the Jewish Reform movement, single mothers, environmentalists, Breslov Hasidics, psychology interns, social workers, homeless people, single fathers, and many more.

The novelty of the 2011 summer protest was thus not only its social content but also in its mode of operation. It not only presented a demand for a ‘new society’, but also performed a ‘new politics’ – a post-postmodern one. Stav Shaffir (2011) described how she and her colleagues found it necessary to go beyond party politics, as well as beyond the politics of civil society organizations, toward something new:

In line with the new language we created this summer – a language of common identity, a language that turns away from such charged words as ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, and which adopts clean concepts like ‘us’ and ‘justice’ – such a movement cannot be a conventional non-profit association or organization. It can be neither a party nor a youth movement. It has to be something new.

The politics of modernity was essentially a politics of distribution that revolved around the categories of class and nation, around conflicts stemming from the world of production and anti-colonial struggles, and with worker unions and political parties as its main agents. Postmodern politics, on the other hand, was essentially a politics of recognition, revolving around communal, gender-based, and ethnic identities, with its main agents being, on the one hand, new social movements and non-governmental organistaions (NGOs), and on the other hand, consumerist individuals. The summer 2011 protest seemed to have combined elements of both. Its class component was predominant both due to the central role played by the middle class, with the attempt to strike an alliance between that class and disempowered groups, and due to the overall demand for a reform in economic policy. At the same time, in a postmodern fashion, class categories were anchored not in issues and conflicts related to the world of employment and manufacturing but rather in issues of distribution and consumption. One of the consequences of the commodification of everyday life characteristic of the neoliberal model is that in post-industrial societies, the homo faber of the industrial age and the citizen of classic liberalism, have been replaced by homo consummator. Neoliberalism subjectifies people as individual consumers. Unlike common postmodern politics, however, these demands did not pertain to the recognitive (identitarian) dimension but rather to the material (resource-based) dimension. The protest was thus neither a clear expression of modern politics nor of postmodern politics, but of the discontent of citizens-turned-consumers under a post-Fordist, neoliberal hegemony.

In the end, however, the crisis of representation did not skip the internal politics of the protest itself, and the question of who are its own representatives was asked since day one. Its initial core immediately won the title ‘the Rothschild cabinet’, gaining a recognized leadership status that relied to a large extent on media exposure. Tensions grew between this more radical core group and the national student union, which was more moderate. Yet, tension also emerged between center and periphery, with the ‘Rothschild cabinet’, identified as Tel-Avivian elitism, being regarded as centralizing and exclusive. Jerusalem’s, Haifa’s, and other encampments in the northern and especially the southern periphery, gave rise to local leaderships that demanded greater representation for the rest of the country. The result was that upon the receding of the protest by the end of the summer, it left no organizational framework that could maintain a continuity of demands and actions. ¹³

Conclusion: The strengths and weaknesses of the 2011 Israeli protest

The summer 2011 protest was an unprecedented event in Israeli history. Never before did hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets in social protest; never did the central strata of society so energetically participate in a social protest; never did a social protest win such sweeping support from the media and the public; and never since the 1985 neoliberal revolution did so many people challenge so intensively the hegemonic free market discourse. Under slogans such as ‘the market is free but we are not’, Israel’s civil society, led by representatives of the middle class, rose to protect itself from the state and from the economic interests of the financial elite, whom that state chose to serve.

At the height of the protest, one could get the impression that a new political subject was being formed: ‘the people’ in the sense of the demos: an alliance of the lower and middle classes constituting itself as the source of political power. The protest could be seen as a process in which, at least for a while, a new collective subject, hitherto unseen in Israel, was being formed: ‘the people’ in its universal, democratic sense of the entirety of the population, coming forward to demand social justice; a class alliance formed vis-à-vis the financial elite and its political supporters, through an experimental process of direct democracy, and a reoccupation of the public sphere. The new encampments became a space for the public and of the public, and a laboratory for experimenting in participatory civil activity. Whereas the crisis of representation typical of the second half of the 1990s and the 2000s drove people away from the political system (a process often referred to as ‘disaffection’), the summer protest presented a possible outlet, in the form of ‘active and creative presence’ of citizens in the public sphere (Urbinati 2006: 27–28), and popular, anti-establishmentarian mobilization (Mainwaring 2006).

At the same time, the protest suffered from several limitations that undermined its long-term success. On the ideological level, although for the first time in Israel the protest placed the demand for social justice at the top of the public agenda, it failed to formulate a radical, comprehensive worldview to counter neoliberal hegemony. The protest lacked a tradition of social thought that extinguished in Israel since the 1980s. Furthermore, although one of the most significant political events ever to take place in Israel, it preferred to stick to an a-political language, and avoided exposing the link between the lack of a welfare state within Israel’s Green Line borders and the existence of one in the Jewish settlements outside it. Above all, the demand for social justice ignored the established national-scale injustice in the Palestinian occupied territories, thereby preventing the protestors from formulating an overall understanding of the pathologies of Israeli society. As we shall see more below, the protest was more expressive than ideological.

On the political level, although the protest renewed and re-circulated the notion of ‘the people’ in its inclusive, social sense, in the end it did not succeed in building bridges between center and periphery, middle class youth and organized workers, and certainly not between the Jewish and the Palestinian sectors within Israel. On the organizational level, although the protest did prove that the Israel public can be awakened from its slumber, it failed to construct a framework that could channel these sporadically gathered energies into directed, continuous action, and an organizational infrastructure that could continue such activities after the summer. When class is constituted around consumption, rather than around production, organization is more difficult, fragmentation is pervasive and mid-term and long-term alliances are hard to sustain.

A full comparison between the Israeli protest and other protests that took place in the same period clearly exceeds the limitations of this article, yet a brief consideration is possible. As Israel, Spain underwent a transition from peripheral Fordism to post-Fordism (Alonso 2001; Banyuls & Recio 2012; Lipietz 1997). As in Israel, Spanish post-Fordism was characterized by the ‘opening’ of the economy in the 1980s, strengthening and concentration of the financial section and moderate deindustrialization of an industrial structure characterized mostly by light industry, the growth of the service sector and the emergence of a young precariat, labor flexibilization and the expansion of consumption as central to the mode of accumulation (Alonso 2001; Banyuls & Recio 2012). Spain was severely hit by the 2008 crisis and the explosion of the real estate bubble, with severe unemployment and harsh austerity measures. As the Israeli protesters, the Spanish Indignados occupied the public space protesting against the neoliberal model, increasing inequality, unemployment, the oligarchy they held responsible for the crisis and the political system. In Spain, as in Israel, the protest was the result of economic unrest combined with a crisis of representation (Resina de la Fuente 2012). ¹⁴ Summing up, as in Israel, also in Spain, we can see the relevance of the three theses we proposed at the beginning of the article to understand social protest.

In conclusion, the social protest that erupted in Israel in 2011 had a clear class character. It was generated by the representatives of the young cohort of the new middle class, who for the first time, since Israel’s sharp turn to neoliberalism in 1985, found its way of life threatened by the contraction of the welfare state; moved to the streets and mobilized also wide sections of the peripheral lower classes; and turned its frustration against the financial-corporate fraction of the capitalist class and against the governments neoliberal policies.

One may not forget, however, that in Israel classes were historically constituted as ethno-classes, through the ethnic-related and unequal distribution of land and space, and as a result of what Oren Yiftachel denominates the ‘ethnic logic of capital’ (Yiftachel 2000a: 730, see also Yiftachel 2000b; Swirski 1989). This logic expressed itself in uneven, ethnic-related flows of investment and in the constitution of ethnic labor market niches (Yiftachel 2000a). During the post-Fordist neoliberal age, there were modifications of the ethno-class configuration, resulting in a more complex interaction between nationality, ethnicity, and class, with the strengthening of a Mizrahi lower middle and middle class, and the constitution of the Ethiopian Jews, and sectors among immigrants from the former USSR as new low classes, and the arrival of migrant workers to occupy the lowest stratum (Adut 2012). Thus, the ethnic character of social stratification in Israel limits the spread, continuance, and impact of the protest as a class event, due to its overdetermination by ethnic, national, and political cleavages, that hamper the creation of a popularly unified ‘people’ – which was the wish of the protestors. Further research should follow this line of thought in order to understand the ways in which current patterns of capital accumulation and state policies influence the ethno-class structure and simultaneously open opportunities and present limits to social protest and social transformation. To conclude, the social protest in Israel in 2011 was a class protest in conditions, where class is heavily entangled with ethnicity and nationalism.