Class/Ethnic Analysis of the Israeli Protests. Max Ajl (via Ran Greenstein, Debate List, South Africa)

Ran Greenstein sez:

Good overall, though marred a bit by dubious psychologizing of 'Arab

Jews' (a dubious term in itself).

Peter sez:

Check out what Max Ajl says about Ofer Eini, leader of the Histadrut, At the recent ITUC Congress, 
as the Histadrut website, proudly claims, 'Eini was also re-elected vice-president 
of the Confederation and to the Steering and Executive Committees'.

Now Read On...

================

Sep 16 2011

by Max Ajl

Social Origins of Israeli Unrest

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/2648/social-origins-of-israeli...-

Dafni Leef has been at both bookends of the recent protests in Israel.

They started in mid-July, when Leef, a Tel Aviv filmmaker, was met

with a hike in her rent that she could not afford to pay. Instead of

moving to a new apartment, she moved to a tent on Rothschild

Boulevard, the city's sleekest thoroughfare, and set up a Facebook

event calling on her compatriots to join her. The spark of dissent hit

tinder, and then the flames alit on a social landscape desiccated by

decades of relentless neo-liberal adjustment. Seven weeks of fiery

protest followed, reaching an apex on 3 September, as over 450,000

people – six percent of the “official” population – gathered in

demonstrations in Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem, across the length and

breadth of Israel.

Housing protests are not new to Israelis: Shaikh Jarrah in East

Jerusalem, Al-Araqib in the Negev are but two recent examples. What

was new about these protests were whom they started with: neither the

sectors most affected by economic dysfunction, like the ramshackle

population centers of the Negev or Sderot, nor in destitute and

immigrant-rich south Tel Aviv. Rather, it was in the city's affluent

north: those who had gone to Hebrew University and Tel Aviv

University, the seminaries of the country's elite; those who had done

the requisite military service; the children of the bourgeoisie or the

declining bourgeoisie, who had expected a smooth ride into an affluent

future and are now colliding with the debris of the shattered Israeli

social compact.

Complaints started in response to rapid increases in the price of

cottage cheese, moved on to the housing crisis, and spread to the

general crisis. A country peppered with billionaires but without a

functioning public transportation system, a country that produces

high-tech drones which it markets to militaries worldwide, but one in

which a third of the workforce earns the minimum wage. A country whose

name still connotes "socialism" in some corners and which is the

second-most-unequal industrialized democracy on the planet.  At the

protests, demands, complaints, cat-calls and concerns centered on

“revolution” and “social justice” – within Israel, not for the four

million Palestinians encaged in Gaza or immured in the West Bank, nor

those in the camps of the Levant.

The demonstrations' demographics have run the gamut.  They began with

the university educated, newly graduated middle class – the Rothschild

encampment was flooded with European faces. But the demonstrations’

spread to development towns indicates that they touched on a far

broader socio-economic base. Most importantly, the Arab Jewish

(Mizrahi) underclass, which can compose as much as ninety percent of

the population of perilous border towns like the municipalities in

northern and southern Israel, where the white European elite, eager to

fill out the territorial envelope of the new Israeli state and thereby

safeguard its borders, deliberately placed them. The widest current

was the middle-class – perhaps sixty percent of the protesters – but

against critics carping about the protests’ “exclusivity,” Palestinian

Israelis also took to Israel’s roadways and plazas, in Nazareth,

‘Arabeh, Sakhnin, Baqa al-Gharabiya, Haifa, Jaffa, and elsewhere.

Polls suggest that eighty-seven percent of Israelis supported the

protests.  Among them were ninety-eight percent of Kadima voters and

ninety-five percent of Labor voters.  Kadima and Labor are the

bastions of the middle and upper-middle class.  Eighty-five percent of

Bibi Netanyahu's Likud, which tends to draw part of its support from

poorer sectors, supported the protests, while seventy-eight percent of

the Shas party – the pillar of Oriental Jewry – also supported the

protests. This last statistic is significant: cowed by state

repression, desperate to show allegiance to an Israel that never

wanted them in the first place, the Arab Jews have been historically

hesitant about hitting the streets, always apprehensive about the

baton of state violence and its verbal minder, the taunt of treason.

Many dismiss the protests with a quick wave of the hand as the whining

of settlers about the rent. Such dismissals miss the unprecedented

nature of the protests. From before the founding of Israel, questions

of class, of intra-Jewish social disharmony and intra-Jewish

oppression, have been excluded from the Israeli agenda. First, secure

the state, and then we will deal with your poverty, has been the

refrain of the “new class” of generals and bureaucrats in league with

domestic and foreign Jewish capitalists who founded Israel. To speak

of class would lay the foundations for a different social project than

the one envisioned by Israeli elites eager to build a Jewish state in

which “Jewish thieves and Jewish prostitutes conduct their business in

Hebrew,” in the words of David Ben Gurion. But amidst constant

warfare, taking care of the poors’ needs had been postponed

perpetually.

Is that postponement at an end? It is still early for definitive

judgment, but two things seem clear.

One, this movement will not break the Israeli structure of power.

Two, this is an early fracture -- a foretaste of later ruptures --

within Zionism.

It would be wonderful to be wrong about the first point.  One could

not foresee the fall of the Shah of Iran from the Peacock Throne in

1977, before months-long street protests put him to flight.  Nor was

the rise of Hugo Chavez prefigured in the caracazo of 1989, the

countrywide riots against Venezuelan neoliberal austerity measures.

Revolutions are inherently unpredictable, as people move out of the

gentle ebbs and flows, the quotidian cycles, of their lives, and move

to messianic time. At such moments belief in their own power, a kind

of collective effervescence, can create opportunities that no one

would have predicted or believed possible just weeks before, and

radical change becomes a kind of mirage that people suddenly will into

becoming real.

Yet such sparks of human creativity and the instinct for freedom

kindle flames within structures designed to douse them. And no

structure has ever been designed with safeguards against revolution

like Israel: a military-Keynesian war economy tightly linked with

imperialism, a color bar dividing the working class along Jewish-Arab

religio-national lines, a state education system that marinates its

citizens in racism, and a material and symbolic economy designed to

dissolve Israeli class struggles in the acid bath of ethno-nationalist

animus.

Still, the fractures within Israeli society are real, no matter

whether they are yet deep enough to shatter the bedrock upon which it

is built. The average apartment is unaffordable for ninety percent of

the population, what Danny Ben Shahar calls a "social time-bomb," in

part the result of housing inflation as a jet-setting Jewish

transnational elite flits into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for the summer,

stays at their "ghost apartments," then returns to Paris and Los

Angeles. Inflation is not restricted to the housing market.  As

Histadrut Labor Federation Chairman Ofer Eini said, "If once I was

able to go to the supermarket and make a NIS 700 purchase, today I pay

double.  And that is not linked to the CPI.  If the CPI rises three

percent the supermarket prices rise thirty percent. The one benefiting

from these rising prices is the government."

Both Eini’s words and his job description are cant: the Histadrut is

only nominally a labor federation. In reality, it assists an

accumulation process tightly tied into the state apparatus, regulating

wages and, notoriously, offloading state enterprises onto

politically-connected figures in the private sector in the robbery

euphemistically called privatization. As ever, the state is not

looking out for the interests of the dispossessed.  It is looking out

for the interests of possessors, and doing so with great care and

skill: ten large business groups now control thirty percent of the

market value of public companies, while sixteen control half of the

money in the whole country.

Furthermore, the idea that it is the government benefiting from rising

prices is dubious.  The government might push inflationary policies,

but historically, Israeli inflation has led to a redistribution of

economic clout from the bottom and middle of Israeli society to its

upper echelons. And it is the latter, welded solidly into

transnational capital circuits, who are inflation's real

beneficiaries, behind the veneer of the state and the politicians they

push into office. Israeli elites frequently do not bother with the

veneer. Amidst a remarkably cartelized economy, prices are pushed

higher and higher, while wages do not come close to keeping pace with

price increases.

So Eini was reminding state managers that Israeli social cohesion is

fraying, with taxes among the highest in the Western world relative to

state welfare spending. And he was telling them to respond to ensure

that fraying does not produce a threat to Israeli social stability.

Revealingly, Eini publicly opposed toppling Netanyahu, clarifying that

the protests "must not shatter the national agenda," code for the

heady communal cohesion, the consensus on the settler-colonial

project, with which Israeli elites corral the populace into support

for militarism.

One can see the protests as the outcome of a process in which the

relative egalitarianism, never socialism, of the early years of

Israeli statehood has been replaced by increasing centralization and

privatization of social wealth. Through the mid-1970s, the Israeli

elite was able to both increase its own power and pay off the lower

ranks of the social hierarchy. It did so through a deft combination of

re-distribution and dispossession, a system in which social discontent

was defused and diffused through colonization, militarism, and

alternative social welfare measures, both material and symbolic, with

the common thread of resolving internal Israeli social problems on the

backs of the native population: the Palestinians.

This tendency was institutionalized in the decision to militarize in

the post-founding period, as Ben-Gurion and other founders

deliberately used the solder of state worship and jingoism to join

millions of new immigrants to the state-linked “new class” inhabiting

the upper posts of the Histadrut and other state institutions.  As

Moshe Sharet, who found these policies distasteful, wrote, in their

view the state "should see war as the principal and perhaps only means

of increasing welfare and keeping the moral tension. . . .  For this

purpose we can concoct dangers," and were even "obliged" to do so.

Meanwhile Ben-Gurion was marketing war and instability to the colonial

heavyweights: first Britain and France in the Sinai misadventure, and

later, others.

By the mid-1960s, with German reparations reduced to a trickle,

economic malaise hit Israel hard. The Israeli elite responded to that

malaise and the episodic industrial unrest among the North African

immigrants that it occasioned by going to war in 1967. That war led to

the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as a symbiosis with

a new metropolitan sponsor, the United States.

In turn, the settlement project began to gather a social base from the

Mizrahim and others, with the tacit and explicit assent of politicians

and social elites alike. Several factors, material and symbolic,

served as the warp and woof of that social base.

First, with the infusion of Palestinians from the occupied territories

into the Israeli labor force, the Mizrahim were shoved upwards in

Israel's socio-economic hierarchy, in the process becoming a petty

bourgeoisie.  As a group of Moroccan Jews explained to Amos Oz, "If

they give back the territories, the Arabs will stop coming to work,

and then you'll put us back into the dead-end jobs, like before.  If

for no other reason, we won't let you give back those territories. . .

.  As long as Begin's in power, my daughter's secure at the bank.  If

you guys [i.e., Labor] come back, you'll pull her down first thing."

Second, the lifestyle settlers living just over the Green Line, and in

the settlements ringing East Jerusalem, are also mostly Mizrahi, as

are the rank and file of the Israeli Defense Forces. It is the Israeli

lower classes that most strongly support the settlement project. This

project has addressed their socio-economic grievances in the cheapest

way possible. The reason why the settlements are built on Palestinian

land is that the cheapest land is freshly stolen land. And until it is

all stolen, there is always more to take. Israel is a settler-colonial

state, and so the lure of resolving Israeli social contradictions and

preventing a left-populist response from the lower sectors through

further thefts from Palestinian society will always glisten in the

minds of Israeli elites. They prefer distributing that which they have

taken from Palestinians to giving up their own wealth or readjusting

their own society.

Third, insofar as social pressure mounts for affordable housing or

welfare disbursements from the state, releasing that pressure is only

partially a question of current distributions from the state. A second

aspect of the same question is future distributions, promised by Labor

and Likud governments alike. The poor can look forward to low-cost

land or housing in settlements that they could never afford in urban

centers. Notoriously, the one place where the welfare state is doing

fine is the West Bank. Polls show overwhelming Israeli popular support

for maintaining the settlements and the occupation of the territories.

Their respondents are, perhaps, dimly aware of the role settlement

expansion plays in cementing Israeli social cohesion by letting off

lower-class social pressure.

Fourth, the army and the settlers are deeply invested in the

settlement project. The latter increasingly occupies the front line

and elite units, and it is those units that would be tasked with

supervising a withdrawal from the settlements as is contemplated in

two-state resolutions. The settlements are a problem, but they are

also a symptom of deeper problems. They are certainly not the

delusional descriptor that Israeli liberals and American realists

alike apply to them: the "begetters" of all sins.

Fifth, the Israeli lower classes, predominantly Arab Jews, gain from

being able to consider themselves part of the dominant socio-ethnic

group--Jews--as opposed to a part of the Arab lower class, alongside

the Palestinians. Racism against Arabs confers symbolic and also

material benefits. It is through racism that the Mizrahim have

historically been able to prove most fervently–even fanatically–their

Israeliness, in the symbolic economy of hate that the founders

constructed. As Sami Chetrit comments, “The Mizrahim have always been

ready to serve as soldiers in the ‘battle’ of hate and oppression

against Palestinians. The occupation has granted them a way to acquire

a cheap nationalist identity…that fits the Ashkenazi nationalist

identity.”

Yet that consciousness induces a schism, as the truth of their

background is betrayed by the simplest device possible: the mirror.

Ashamed of their reflection, they project that shame in outward

displays of hatred. As Chetrit continues, “by always being obliged to

be anti-Arab, the Mizrahi is obliged to be against the Arabness within

himself.” So the Mizrahi population has historically been far more

racist than the Ashkenazi founders. This racism lingers even as the

cultural markers of its background have been partially scoured from

Israeli society. And the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi divide lingers: most Jews

are of unmixed heritage, Israeli Jewish populations vote along ethnic

lines, and spatial segregation endures. As Sammy Smooha writes, "Most

Mizrahim share a collective memory of being subject to large-scale

ethnic discrimination, cultural repression, and ill treatment during

the 1950s. These are some of the indicators demonstrating that the

dormant ethnic problem may still breed resentment and strife."

Finally, those at the top ranks of the military, as well as those with

investments in construction or who benefit from cheap Palestinian

labor, are directly invested in the settlement enterprise. Between the

fraction of the elite invested in the settlement project and

widespread popular support for it, it is no wonder that it continues.

The occupation and constant warfare provide a popular justification

for Israeli militarization, and it is off that militarization and the

axial role of the military in the Israeli economy that the Israeli

elite gorges. If there is one thing the Israeli upper class does not

want, it is an intra-elite feud. Most of the Israeli elite may receive

little direct economic benefit from the settlement project, but it is

cheaper to maintain the occupation than to end it, at least for the

time being.

The occupation also finds its place in the ideological struggle over

what Israeli society is, a struggle that involves battles over what it

was and over what it will be. The Israeli right wing routinely points

out that the same logic that impels an end to the occupation could as

well be applied to the entire process of Israeli state formation. For

them, if the takeover of Lydda, Acre, and Ashdod was justified in

1948, then the occupation of Judea and Samarra in 1967 was likewise

justified.  There is truth to their argument: if Israeli colonization

was condonable in 1948, why is it suddenly condemnable in 1967?

The question's answer touches on a deeper truth: the role that the

belief in the rightness of Israeli actions plays within Israeli

society. That society is made up of an odd jumble of social blocs:

ultra-orthodox Haredi, Central and Eastern European Jewish, immigrants

from ultra-religious neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Ethiopian, Iraqi,

Kurdish, and Algerian Jews, the recent Russian immigrants, fifteen to

twenty, perhaps even fifty percent of whom are not even Jewish.

Zionism is the integument holding together a fissiparous society in

which over twenty-five percent of the population was not even born in

Israel.

A society united by nationalism is one that is unlikely to notice the

division that matters most: the constantly widening one between the

rich and the poor. Settlement withdrawal could become a solvent to the

nationalist binding of Israeli society. It is for that reason that the

elite constantly stalls on the issue of a final settlement. They

prefer the stasis of a peace process that is long on process and short

on peace to a rending withdrawal of 250,000--or 500,000--settlers.

Such a withdrawal might tear Israeli society apart on economic and

ethnic fault lines. Few within Israel are prepared to contemplate the

costs of that withdrawal when the status quo costs them so little.

But those costs are changing constantly, as the Israeli economy and

its interweaving with the global economic system shifts.  Through the

mid-1980s, Israeli elites adroitly combined occupation, militarism,

and irredentism into a smooth social consensus.  By the end of that

period, military spending was running at thirty percent or more of

Israeli GDP. This spending, combined with a bout of hyperinflation,

helped cartelize the Israeli economy into huge business groups. In

turn, the government put in place the scaffolding for a new phase of

development: the July 1985 economic stabilization plan. It scuppered

the social contract by ending government subsidies, devaluing the

currency, restricting wage growth, and opening the economy to foreign

capital. That capital moved in and voraciously bought up Israeli

assets--Israeli "globalization."

Along with "globalization" came the need for a new way to deal with

the Palestinians: the Oslo process, as the Israeli elite attempted an

impossible task. On the one hand, they had to maintain the occupation

at a low simmer and normalize Israeli relations with the region, as

they attempted to turn Israeli into a high-tech regional entrepôt. On

the other, they had to maintain Israeli nationalist fervor and social

cohesion, all the while not cutting too sharply into the military that

is the breeding ground for the country's elite.  With fractures and

fissures running along and through Israeli society, the Oslo process

ended with the arrival of Bush II. He put paid to American quavering

about the occupation, as Israeli militarism and Zionism again were

smoothly in sync with the imperial policies of its patron. For his

part Sharon paid the Israeli elite its peace dividend by deepening the

neo-liberal project, in the process worsening the economic straits of

the middle- and upper-middle classes. The Rothschild protests are his

child.

Yet after eight years of tremendous Bush-era looting, the Obama

administration and its renewed commitment to the "peace process" again

foregrounded tensions inherent in Israeli accumulation. The strains

stemming from a large fragment of the elite's links with global

capital combined with Israel’s burgeoning militarism and reactionary

fanaticism pushed along by militarism, created, as Gabriel Ash writes,

"a powerful demand not as much for peace as for the absence of war."

Yet that was an unstable alloy, with its precise composition capable

of being adjusted depending on the prices to the elite of the various

inputs.

It is that cost-benefit matrix that the July 14 protests and their

unclear aftermath can indirectly affect. They can highlight the fact

that the occupation and, more importantly, the militarism which

produced it and which it reproduces, both relies on and reproduces

ethnic cleavages. These ethnic cleavages have functioned to divert

popular attention from the deepest fissure of all: that between the

haves and the have-nots. And it is along precisely that fissure that

the protests have taken place.

Indeed, the protesters spent much of the past seven weeks in a

low-grade conflict with the state-elite nexus. On one level, this was

amazing because it bridged the historical rift between Mizrahi and

Ashkenazi – one of a series of intra-Israeli social cleavages that the

elite uses to maintain power. More striking still was that the

demonstrators were not merely emulating the Egyptian protesters, but

articulating that thinking on mainstream media. They publicly and

unabashedly echoed the Arab example, claiming that the Arab Spring has

blossomed into an Israeli Summer.  As one middle-class Israeli

suggested, "We have to do what they did in Egypt.  Yalla, tahrir,

jihad."  A popular chant went, “the people want social justice,”

copying the Arab calls that have cascaded across the region over the

last eight months. To turn the Egyptian example into a model shatters

Israeli social taboos, and that is one of the more striking and

under-noticed aspects of the protests. In Gaza City a friend once

asked me if the Israelis considered themselves tourists in the region

or were here to stay. In a painfully partial manner, the tent protests

were, perhaps, beginning to glint with the glimmer of an answer to

that question.

But one had to squint hard to see that glimmer. Without a call for

dealing with Palestinian grievances, there was, and is, something odd

and unreal about the social justice protests. They are like a

photograph in which all the red tone has leached out, leaving it cold

and lifeless.

Meanwhile, from the Palestinians, under a decades-long occupation, the

intricacies of internal Israeli social discontent and the nuances of

Israeli social mobilization have, to some extent understandably,

elicited sneers and jeers. The cost of bread to a Jewish family in

Ashkelon is a real problem. But in the hierarchy of suffering, it

cannot rank next to the experience of a family in a Gaza refugee camp

that lived in Ashkelon when it was called Majdal and which was

cleansed from there in 1948. Perhaps their bakery was destroyed during

the 2008-2009 attack which most Israelis now complaining about high

bread prices openly supported. For that reason Palestinians have

broadly responded to the protests with reinvigorated calls for

Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions. This is in part a reflection of a

fear that internal Israeli political mobilization could be taken as a

substitute rather than a supplement to sanctions.

Looked at from the outside, the lacuna when it comes to core

Palestinian grievances, particularly the occupation, is a

sociologically jarring absence. It is like poor American antebellum

field hands clamoring for the minimum wage without blinking an eye at

the dark men in chains working in the fields next to the ones in which

they are toiling. But that a racist society produces a racist protest

movement is almost unavoidable. Resistance movements must start with

the human material which they possess, not with the human material

they wished they possessed. As historian Staughton Lynd put it, "Who

were the workers who made the Russian Revolution?  Sexists,

nationalists, half of them illiterate.  Who were the workers in Polish

Solidarity?  Anti-Semitic, whatever.  That kind of struggle begins to

transform people." This is a transformation one sees in embryonic form

in the Mizrahi-Ashkenazi solidarity within the protests themselves, a

solidarity that has spread to the Palestinian-Israeli sector.

Furthermore, people articulate their resistance to oppression, at

first, in the terms in which that oppression appears to them. To the

average Israeli, the ones who were at the protests, the occupation is

not tied into their experience of oppression. Indeed, that occupation

is part of stoking the Zionist sentiment and soldering the

intra-Jewish communal bonds such that Israel's Jewish citizens either

do not notice intra-communal oppression or do not act upon it. It is

frequently forgotten that the Zionist left did used to talk about the

occupation. But all it did was talk--tossing a bone to dissenters.

Bringing the occupation back into the Israeli national conversation is

meaningless without political action to end it, and political action

starts with entering the public space and making demands.

So understanding the partial opening represented by the tent protests,

and pace the politically naïve naysaying of outside observers,

Palestinian citizens of Israel gingerly articulated their demands with

those of the Jewish protesters. They set up Tent 48 in the midst of

Rothschild. Big rallies in Haifa and Jaffa drew mixed Arab and Jewish

crowds, with Palestinian speakers. Encampments mushroomed in the

cities and villages of the Palestinian Israelis. As Abir Kopty, a

social justice activist, comments, “Most Pales­tini­ans are choosing

to bring their voice to this movement and not isolate them­selves.

July 14 is an oppor­tu­nity for Pales­tini­ans to organize and

motivate them­selves. It will not, however, bring the change

Pales­tini­ans seek.” As she adds, “July 14 has created

oppor­tu­ni­ties for activism that the Israeli regime has worked long

and hard to prevent. People have come together, and this is already

power. Yet this movement will not go beyond the Zionist bound­aries;

it might achieve concrete demands, but it will not change the dominant

social, economic and political struc­tures.” Healthcare, housing, and

education are not the parochial concerns of either Jews or

Palestinians but the concerns of the poor – and the Palestinians are

among the poorest social groups in Israel.

Furthermore, a transfer of state resources from militarism to social

infrastructure may not be intended to help Palestinians.  Yet, it will

help them nonetheless, by weakening the machinery of oppression and

occupation that relentlessly grinds Palestinian society. According to

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) figures,

sixteen percent of Israeli gross domestic product is devoted to

military spending, much of which gets funneled to the increasingly

privately owned Israeli military-industrial complex. The occupation is

not, strictly speaking, needed to sustain that military spending. Yet

peace and peace dividends would hardly suit a society that was built

on and is sustained by warfare and a constant flow of weapons and

military-oriented investment from the United States.

Perhaps more important than structural victories would be the effect

of such victories on the Israeli consciousness. For that reason the

Israeli government feared the protests. Any victories would have

offered a dangerous lesson to the human beings who make up the gears

and pulleys and levers, all the whirring machinery of the apartheid

system: that occupation and racism are not just a means of social

control over a reeling and shattered Palestinian society, but over the

Israeli lower classes themselves.

In the rapid swirl of reportage, analysis, and dismissal, such people

were nearly disappeared. But they too mobilized. In the Hatikva

neighborhood, which has voted right for decades, working-class

Israelis set up a tent protest. Later, on 3 September, the people

there would march with Palestinian Israelis from Jaffa. Mizrahi

activists almost immediately set up a tent camp in Levinsky Park, in

south Tel Aviv, an area full of crack-heads and immigrant workers, a

world away from Rothschild, filled with representatives of the 300,000

semi-legal laborers who occupy the occupational rungs in the Israeli

work force previously occupied by Palestinians from the West Bank and

Gaza Strip. That encampment was raided repeatedly by police--a hint at

why it is the Ashkenazi middle and upper-middle classes that made the

protests throb in their oddly lifeless way. The Mizrahi working

classes remember what happened to the Israeli Black Panthers,

destroyed by a mix of co-optation and state violence.

And what do they, whose oppression is nearest that of the

Palestinians, think of the occupation that maintains the Israeli color

bar in the most Faustian manner? Who knows.  Indeed, it is the tragedy

of the Israeli left that it is precisely amongst the working classes

that one historically finds the strongest support for occupation and

anti-Arab racism. It is those social sectors which compose the social

base of the rightist Likud and its coalition ally, the Shas party. And

so long as caste and not class is the line that separates, the specter

of a sectarian schism will always loom.

Re-drawing that line is one of the key struggles within Israel, and it

is to that struggle that the Palestinian tents also contributed. In

Kopty’s words, “Many tents…engaged Jewish activists, which creates an

alter­na­tive and chal­lenges the existing structure of separation.”

It is the careful, hesitant, difficult, and tenuous braiding of Arab

and Jewish struggles that leads to the basis in consciousness for a

more widely-spread joint struggle than that taken up by the picayune

anti-colonial Israeli left.

Additionally, despite the idiosyncratic Israeli insistence that the

protests were "social," not "political," they produced open

confrontation. In several instances, the state violently arrested

activists, for example, at a demonstration of single mothers in front

of Amidar, the Israeli public housing authority. There, Black Panther

founder Reuven Abergel pointed out that the police were violently

putting down protests in Israel’s “backyard,” south Tel Aviv, while

Rothschild was calm and orderly. Its constituents could be expected to

behave, and if not, be bought off cheaply. And Israel’s rulers will

try to do so as cheaply as possible. They are aware that any

re-orientation of spending from militarism to housing will lay a

foundation for further victories, most importantly at the level of

allowing new horizons of what it is possible or rational to struggle

for to suddenly become visible.

Meanwhile, forces internal to July 14 have struggled, sometimes

surreptitiously, to break any tentative link between Palestinian and

Jewish mobilization. Particularly among the well-financed student

unions, which provided much of the organizational and monetary muscle

of the tent protests, the urge has been to divert energy from common

class struggle into an attempt at a return to the Israel of their

parents and grandparents. During those days, the Ashkenazi

middle-class could live well while Arabs--Jewish, Muslim, and

Christian alike--were either dispossessed or labored in the lower

reaches of Israeli society. Unshockingly, it was those heading the

student unions who, in an internal coup d’état, blotted out from the

movement’s list of demands Palestinian grievances like recognition of

the unrecognized Bedouin villages and expansion of the municipal

borders of Palestinian villages and towns so as to allow for their

natural development.

They are also the ones who called for the protests to move to a “new

stage” after the 3 September demonstrations. It would have been absurd

to expect those who are loosely connected with the elite, or who hope

to feed again at its trough, to draw the class-based connections

needed for Palestinian and Jewish class-based revolt. Those who hope

to rejoin the upper-middle class would never link Israel's

stratospheric subsidies for high-tech investment to the privatization

of the state-owned industrial plant and the gutting of the social

compact. Nor would they ever go on to analyze the reasons behind the

non-stop militarization, the constant wars, and the rockets falling on

southern and northern Israel from the Arabs the Israeli military

complex profits from persecuting, oppressing, murdering, and

immiserating. Yet in the absence of such connections, the dominant

caste of the working class can always be mobilized for National

Socialism or right-wing populism.

Revolts go in waves. Consider 3 September and its hundreds of

thousands the end of the first wave. With the government convening the

Trachtenberg Commission, considering “reforms” of the Israeli economy,

and set to release its results at the end of the month, it is whiling

away time, aware that people cannot protest forever. They need to work

and they need to eat. Itzik Shmuli, the head of the National Student

Union, has opted for a political career. The student unions called on

protesters to “go home,” having not even received crumbs. Social

upsurges have their opportunists, and take Shmuli as symbolic of a

desire for return to the golden years of Mapai hegemony, when the

lower classes, ever-anxious about their Israeliness, supported the

wars and the state, choosing from the raggedy choices laid out before

them by the founders.

Then take Leef. In her speech, cut off mid-way by public television

stations, she spoke of growing up, “Moments and memories full of

death,” including the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin but also the 2006

invasion of Lebanon. Then she added, “I am proud to be an Israeli

seven weeks now,” adding that, “If you are a Gaza evacuee – things

must change. If you are Bedouin – things must change.” One can take

that for what it is while deploring what it is not. But there is no

reason to only shift one’s gaze that far left and no farther. Farther

left is a statement from twenty groups and organizations on both sides

of the Green Line, including the Israeli Communist Party, the Union of

Palestinian Working Women, the Palestinian People’s Party, and others,

calling for a “popular joint struggle,” in which they “welcome the

participation and integration of the Palestinian population in Israel

in the social protest.” These groups are small, with small

constituencies, but embryos start as cells. Then they grow – perhaps

drawing on people in the Jesse Cohen camp in Holon, a Mizrahi city

south of Tel Aviv, who were just pummeled by a police crackdown. They

may look to the example of those in Levinsky, where the state has

tried to evict the protesters, or those who stormed the Tel Aviv

municipality on 7 September. One can doubt, but as in any moment of

collective revolt, a theology of hope is instinctual.

So what are we seeing in Israel? A farce? A brief spasm over bread?

Spoiled whingeing over the price of a flat for the children of the

generals? An impossible chimera of joint struggle, the faint

historical tracings of the Palestine Communist Party evanescently

appearing in the Israeli imaginary? The social base for fascism and

the regional cataclysm that will go along with it? Maybe we are seeing

all of those things. Different futures co-habit in the mercury of the

present. Bringing about the best one will require changing Israeli

society and consciousness, at the same time as others apply external

pressure through boycotts and sanctions – akin to the heat applied to

an egg. And what that egg will hatch is a matter of both internal and

external will.

And so what will happen is, at least in part, for the people of Israel

to decide. As in the mechanized army of Bertolt Brecht's poem,

"General, Your Tank Is a Powerful Vehicle," the machine of Israeli

accumulation cannot operate without human drivers.  In Brecht's poem,

he writes that man is useful.  "He can fly and he can kill.  But he

has one defect: He can think."  Do the "new men" of Israel share this

flaw? Nearly every July 14 protest ended in the singing of the

national anthem and the brandishing of the Israeli flag.

Self-appointed leaders are flocking to calls for a return to the

killing machine of the Ashkenazi welfare-warfare state, with the

possibility of the Zionist left coming in from its long winter of

isolation and quiescence, rejoining the social consensus in its

historical role as an insistent nag, complaining about the occupation

yet doing nothing about it.

In a country bound by surety in the rightness of the past, the

population is clearly having trouble bucking the barriers of the

national consensus on ignoring the occupation. That quietude invites a

savage dissent into rightwing populism, a third bout of ethnic

cleansing, with its human material, the traditional fodder from the

lower classes, in a social pact with an upper class which will do

nearly anything to hold on to its power.

Israeli history weighs like an alp upon the minds of its people.

Whether they will be able to throw it off is the question that is now

before them. Even in trying, they may fail. But without trying,

failure is certain, and that failure will not just be theirs but also

ours. Because we will inherit the world of blood and fire that will be

its aftermath.

[A somewhat different version of this essay was originally published

at MRZine]

-- 

Ran Greenstein

Johannesburg, South Africa

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