#J14 IN TEL AVIV: THE END OF THE SUMMER CAMP
The social justice movement in Tel Aviv, September-October 2011
Shocked by the high rent prices of Tel Aviv, Daphni Leef set up a facebook page calling for the establishment of protest camp against the lack of affordable housing on Rothschild Boulevard on July 14th. Within days, thousands had put up their tent in the streets and parks of Israel, giving life to one of the largest social movements in the country’s history, culminating in a series of massive demonstrations that brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets united by one demand: social justice (tzedek avarit). With the ratio between the highest and the lowest income of 2 to 1 Israel was, at the time of its establishment, one of the world’s most egalitarian societies. Today things are very different, and after decades of uninterrupted neoliberal hegemony very little is left of the utopias dreamed up by the early zionist settlers, with 20% of the population living below the poverty line and the country’s economy firmly in the grasps of a few well-connected business groups. While corrupted politicians privatize the state out of existence, cartels distort prices and financial speculators turn the cities into housing fashion shows.
The “J14″ social justice movement captured the growing dissatisfaction with these trends and, through its massive protests and colorful tents, managed to occupy the public debate with the theme of “social justice” for several months. Symbolized by its happy bunch of media-savvy “protest leaders”, the struggle for social justice inspired the middle class and brought back a sense of political engagement that had long deserted what was once a highly ideological society. The movement defined itself as “non-political”, carefully avoided any controversial issue such as the country’s relationship to the Palestinians, and sought to mobilize citizen from all across Israel’s polarized society. While mystifying to many external observers, this “non-political” approach proved successful, bringing under the same banner a wide range of grievances ranging from those of supporters of captive IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, who accused the government of not doing enough for his release, to the growing frustration of the increasingly precarious middle class, who finds itself squeezed out of the increasingly expensive cities of the “start-up nation”.
Unfortunately, the Israeli Revolution, as its members liked to call it, never quite managed to define what “social justice” actually meant, let alone how to achieve it. And if the movement succeeded in achieving a degree of total consensus with the vast majority of the country, it was never capable of articulating its demands into the political realm. With decades of experience in how to outlive political challenges by sheer inertia, the Netanyahu government mostly ignored the whole thing and when it no longer could, resorted to a quintessentially Israeli strategy: it set up a committee to investigate the issue. In any case, by September the summer was drawing to a close and public interest quickly faded away, leaving a lot of empty tents in the streets of Tel Aviv and a small group of activists and homeless to carry on the struggle, in an increasingly surreal decline which eventually saw the tent camps evicted forcibly by the police. And just as it had appeared, the social justice movement disappeared. It was a movement but it was not “political”, and there where a lot of tents. And it was about social justice.
