Small turnout at weekend rally signal needs for new strategy, some say
Israel’s tent protest movement, which less than three weeks ago could rally hundreds of thousands of protestors and force the government to address their demands, seems to be waning as the summer draws to a close.
Only about 10,000 protesters attended a rally in Tel Aviv on Saturday night, while elsewhere around the country another 10,000 more gathered in Jerusalem, Rishon Lezion, the Golan Heights and Kibbutz Ma’anit. The movement isn’t ready to give up the fight and is planning a million-person march next Saturday, but many are doubtful that it can maintain the momentum.
“Anybody that knows about protests knows that inevitably the number of people coming out is going to go down,” said Gadi Wolfsfeld, a Hebrew University political scientist and author of Making Sense of Media and Politics: Five Principles in Political Communication Politics. “They are supposed to have million-man march, which doesn’t make sense because, no matter what they do, they won’t get that.”
Even as Israel’s economy is growing strongly and unemployment is at its lowest in decades, the tent protestors have struck a nerve with the country’s middle class. The movement, which has never given itself a name or a formal structure, gave expression to ordinary Israelis who fell they haven’t fully shared in the boom as income gaps have grown, prices for consumer goods are high and wages have stagnated.
“Once, people were able to save enough money to buy an apartment, and now people feel that they’ll never get there,” Sari Revkin, executive director of Yedid, a non-profit that operates a network of Citizen Rights Centers in underprivileged and marginalized communities, told The Media Line.
She participated in the rallies over the weekend and said people continue to express fears about their future. “People with a BA degree are paying half their income to rent. There’s no way to save enough to buy an apartment. That means something has to be very different – not a little more here, a little more there,” she said.
Shmuel Shye, a statistician and founder of the Center for Social Justice and Democracy at Jerusalem’s Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, found those fears are widespread among the protestors. He asked 129 tent dwellers in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem why they were protesting and found that more than 80% said it was the fears for their future “physical and financial” security.
Not everyone is convinced the movement has passed its prime. Defense Minster Ehud Barak, speaking on Israel Radio on Sunday, urged the government to embrace the movement and its agenda. He said the Defense Ministry, whose %% billion shekels ($15.3 billion) budget is being targeted by many as a source of funds for increased social spending, was ready to contribute.
“I don’t recommend eulogizing it. I think that it’s premature,” Barak said about the movement. “This protest is one of the most important events to have occurred in Israel in decades. It’s a unique opportunity to change domestic priorities.”
The protest movement had been gathering force since the start of the year, beginning with protests against rising gasoline prices. But it took off with a hugely popular boycott against cottage cheese in June that forced dairies to lower prices. The tent camps began in mid-July, initially in protest against the high cost of housing. But they rapidly expanded its agenda to encompass an overhaul of the economy and society; including tax reform, free education and childcare, an end to the privatization of state-owned companies and more public housing and transportation.
The number of protestors grew, too. Tent cities, like Ur-encampment on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, sprouted across the country and a series of mass rallies peaked August 6 when as many as 300,000 people took to the streets. Worried that the protests represented a major social and political phenomenon, a day later Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appointed a government committee to hear protestors’ demands and make recommendations.
"I understand my views need to change," Netanyahu reportedly said at a meeting with the committee’s chairman, Manuel Trajtenberg, two days after the nationwide rallies.
But an attack by terrorists August 18 near the resort city of Eilat resulted in taking some of the wind out of the protest movements and Israelis refocused on their traditional concerns about security. Eight people were killed, and the army has since been trading fire with Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip, whom it holds responsible for the killings. The Saturday night protest following the attacks saw just 4,000 demonstrators join in a low-profile, silent march.
On Sunday, Netanyahu promised that the tense security situation on the border with Egypt wouldn’t distract the government from pursuing an enhanced social agenda. “We have responsibility to undertake social reforms and we will do it,” he told the weekly cabinet meeting.
Activists and observers say the movement has to move beyond its origins as a street-based, spontaneous phenomenon and start to organize. While the movement’s leaders are still adhering to their campaign of frequent rallies, with an ambitious “march of a million,” they are also starting to devise an organized list of demands.
Instead of letting the government’s Trajtenberg committee set the agenda alone – the movement’s leader have criticized the panel as "cynical and deceptive" – they have formed their own anti-Trajtenberg committee, using the skills and knowledge of some 50 experts.
“Everyone knows that the stage of tents is not going any further,” said Yedid’s Revkin. “It’s done what it could do. There are some people who want to just keep saying ‘social justice’ and let someone else figure out what it means, but there are others who have very concrete positions.”
Wolfsfeld believed that if the tent movement wants to have real influence and bring about a change in the government’s spending priorities, it will have to form a political party.
Israeli elections tend to be fought over security and diplomatic issues, but if the Middle East stays quiet, it’s possible that large numbers of centrist voters could be swayed by pocketbook issues in the next elections, now scheduled for 2013. That could propel a new political party into the next ruling coalition.
“In the end coalitions are what give out money and the rest is just show business,” Wolfsfeld said. “Unless you’re in a government coalition, you’re not going to change national priorities.”