The Arab Spring protests throughout the Middle East this year have had many sources. Some were political; the former regimes of Tunisia and Egypt and the current governments of Syria and Yemen, were all authoritarian regimes posing as democracies with varying degrees of actual freedom.¹ These states all had the same leaders in power for longer periods of time than what would be acceptable in most current-day democracies, and their elections, if there were any at all, were clearly rigged in some fashion. There were also economic considerations. Not only were the gaps between the wealthy and the poor in these states exceedingly high, the economies were so bleak that many college-educated younger people were unable to find jobs, sometimes for years at a time. There was a general consensus that the current leaders did not have the best interests of the people at heart. When I put all of these realizations together, I realized that these issues are not confined exclusively to the Arab World. Many people even in the First World feel frustration with the largely neo-liberal philosophies that have ushered their financial institutions into an era of deregulation and greater economic inequalities lasting more than a decade. Many even feel that their democratic governments do not represent them well enough to their satisfaction. It didn’t take long for similar protests to burst out to parts outside of the Middle East, even within the First World. There were economically-driven protests in Spain, politically-based democracy protests in China and India, and even in the United States, there were mass protests in the State of Wisconsin against the attempts of Governor Scott Walker to curb and even eliminate certain collective bargaining rights. Once the protests had spread beyond the Middle East, I began to wonder why there were no mass protests in the one state that is both located within the Middle East, while also belonging to the First World: Israel.

Contrary to the knee-jerk tendencies of many of its staunchest supporters, Israel actually has many similar problems as its neighbors. Like its neighbors, Israel has a relatively limited number of politicians who acquire high positions. There are significant portions of Israel’s population who feel a growing sense of disillusionment with the state, who do not feel part of the mainstream Israeli nation and who feel excluded from the political process. In addition, despite an extremely socialistic past, Israel has moved away from the socialism of its youth and towards an American-style neo-liberal form of deregulated capitalism since the mid-1990s during the first administration of who is also the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Subsequently, this has helped create an enormous rift between the haves and have-nots in Israel. This also created a separate, though related, issue: Israel’s rates of poverty are significantly higher than those of most First-World countries.

And of course, I haven’t even yet mentioned the big elephant in the room, the source of many continuous grievances in every corner of the Middle East: what some people refer to as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and others refer to as the Arab-Israeli conflict.²

Once I saw these similarities, I was astonished that hardly anyone else was asking the same question I was: why are there no mass protests in Israel too? Obviously there were some other factors that made the situation in Israel very different, and I had my suspicions as to what they were, primarily that there was some sort of self-censorship at work. Because of the perception of an existential threat facing Israel since its founding, the concept of Israeli unity has become somewhat of a national obsession. In response, there have been trends amongst Israel’s most wanting Jewish populations to accept a certain amount of economic or political injustice in order, depending on your perspective, to preserve or create in the first place the unity of the Israeli nation against a common enemy. Although this societal pressure to self-censure has ebbed slightly over time, as exemplified by the relative success of the Israeli Black Panther movement from the Mizrachi Jews of Middle Eastern descent, such deeply-imbedded trends do not disappear overnight, and I suspected that this was still a major factor causing the lack of mass protests in Israel. Another factor differentiating Israel from other Middle Eastern countries is that Israel, for all of its glaringly-obvious political flaws, is still a truer democracy than Egypt, Libya, or Syria. A change in leadership is quite possible in Israel without resorting to revolution. Indeed, it can happen as often as every two or three years at times. I supposed that this could cause some pressure to be vented by a frustrated public so that it doesn’t build up and explode, as it occurred elsewhere in the Middle East.

And of course, although the problems of injustice and inequality that exist in Israel are very real, they are not as stark as similar problems in countries like Egypt, Syria, and Libya. To paraphrase one Israeli cab driver I encountered in Jerusalem named Emanuel, “Here they [politicians] take millions, not billions!” It was absurdly tragic to the point of comedy, but the eccentric cab driver made a fair point. The corruption that exists in Israel, while rampant, is still not on the same scale as it exists amongst some of its neighboring countries. But there should be another factor considered here. Israel, despite its government’s flaws, is nevertheless a member of the First World, and higher standards should be applied to it. Furthermore, compared to the Third World, the Israeli public ought to have a lower threshold for how much corruption and mismanagement it tolerates before it takes action. It’s a matter of logic.

In that case, from my perspective, there were many legitimate sources of resentment towards the Israeli state from the Israeli nation³, including Palestinian-Israeli, Jewish-Israeli, and from foreign workers in Israel. It was not yet entirely clear to me what all of the factors that were keeping the people off of the streets were, though I had some ideas. And I was also convinced that there were far more interesting answers than just “Israel is the only true democracy in the Middle East!”

As it turns out, I was largely correct. The factors I had anticipated appeared, to a certain extent, to be real causes of a placated population. And there were other factors I had not considered until I arrived in Israel. It was indeed much more complicated than “Israel is the only true democracy in the Middle East!” And of course, very real protests for social justice sprung out of what appeared to many people as being from nowhere in mid July 2011, within days of my return to the United States. Indeed, I spoke to many people in Israel who assured me with great confidence, “There will not be mass protests in Israel any time soon!” for one reason or another. Many of these people would later come to eat their words. One man I spoke to at great length, Professor Avner Faingulernt from Sapir College in Sderot, Israel, wrote to me after the protests had started, “It is extraordinary. I couldn’t have believed it could happen. I couldn’t have predicted it and it exposed as one of the most beautiful phenomena in Israel.”

I arrived in Israel on May 6th, 2011. Upon my arrival, I was immediately reminded of how fragmented Israeli society was. There are so many different ways people can be divided up, in terms of religion, religiosity⁴, religious sect, ethnicity, class, political orientation regarding the conflict, and political orientation regarding everything else. And they all have different positions on an enormous range of issues. As a result, there is hardly any unanimity in Israel regarding anything. An Israeli left-wing politician and news commentator by the name of Yossi Sari published an entire piece in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz entitled “The Myth of Israeli Solidarity.” According to Sarid, “Israeli solidarity was a lovely fairy tale, flattering to the national ego, told to a million poor children before bedtime” (Sarid). He goes on:

Israeli society was and remains torn: Jews and Arabs, secular and religious, sabras and immigrants, supporters of Greater Israel and of dividing the land, neo-liberals and social democrats. And every camp is divided internally, and anyone who is not with us is against us.

Sarid also explicitly connects the dots to show how in his mind, the social and economic inequalities in Israel are puncturing holes in the idea of Israeli solidarity, and that Israel’s leaders are to blame for it.

There can be no solidarity in a state that is notorious for the gap between its rich and its poor, that leaves behind millions of its people, that forces Holocaust survivors to fight for their dignity and crusts of bread. Look at what was done to the Zionist enterprise, which aimed for relative equality; it became Treasure Island for the few, and an island of inequality for the many. Solidarity is not melting from the bottom up, it is collapsing from the top down. We look to the leaders that we raised up; they misused us, they feathered their own nests in between terms, and sometimes during them as well.

While some people might dismiss this as the rantings of an old and washed-up left-wing friar, Israeli slang for sucker, this is not so. I saw the gaps in Israeli solidarity with my own eyes. Within the first few days of my arrival in Israel, I spoke to two different cab drivers from two different ethnic groups and religious sects about the nature of protests in Israel and why there were not any mass protests at the moment. The first cab driver I spoke to was Jewish, religious, and was of Middle Eastern descent, or Mizrachi. He bitterly told me that there will never be mass protests in Israel because Israelis only think about themselves and there is no unity amongst the people. Just a day later, I met Emanuel, another cab driver, who is also Jewish, but secular and of European descent, or Ashkenazi. He thought Israeli Jews are actually very united, and that they have to be out of necessity, and that there would never be mass protests from Israeli Jews, although there would be from Palestinian Israelis. Two random cab drivers, who appear to accurately reflect different major sects of Israeli society, and they don’t even have unity regarding whether or not there is unity! It was like a farce.⁵

Once the depths to the deep dissension within Israeli society are understood, it becomes no wonder why there have been so little mass protests in Israel over the years, and what took Israel half a year to start what seemingly emerged overnight in Egypt. The population is so heterogenous, so divided in terms of political aims, mass protest movements with the support of an entire people simply aren’t possible in Israel! A student named Zohar at Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva explained that smaller protests happen all the time in Israel, and in her opinion, it was better that way because it suits Israel more because of Israel’s inherent heterogeneity, and because smaller protests are more effective. As she put it, “Israel doesn’t have a goal big enough to get hundreds of thousands out into the streets” (Zohar). And even more telling, she also claimed that Israel doesn’t have a single enemy large enough to blame for all of its problems.

Zohar also helped me see that politics in Israel were as complicated as the population that gave rise to them. She pointed out to me the most telling factor in Israeli politics: that people In Israel have two different sets of political beliefs. One set of beliefs about economics and social policy, the other about the conflict. Unfortunately, the two components of this divide do not always go together. Given Israel’s socialist past, there are still a lot of people in Israel who have sympathies with socialistic economic policy. Unfortunately, the current government under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, is very right-wing when it comes to the conflict as well as economic policy. When push comes to shove, as Zohar told me, “the conflict always comes first” and many people vote for right-leaning parties that they don’t agree with on economic policy out of fear for Israel’s security. This was clear evidence that the conflict was holding back natural forces that could lead to economic change in Israel.

And she wasn’t the only one to express such a belief to me. I met with Yehuda Shaul, one of the founders of one of the most prominent activist organizations in Israel, called Shovrim Shtika, or Breaking the Silence. To quote their website, “Breaking the Silence is an organization of veteran combatants who have served in the Israeli military since the start of the Second Intifada and have taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality of everyday life in the Occupied Territories.” Not surprisingly, they are a highly controversial organization, and are often regarded, like many others, as left-wing friars, and even traitors. However, Yehuda did not give off such an aura at all. He spoke quite moderately and was far from the most extreme person I spoke to in Israel. He also spoke to me of the duality of Israeli politics, how in Israeli elections, the conflict always comes first.

He was full of many other insights as well. In fact, he shared with me an insight at the very end of my time in Israel that I wish I had had when I first arrived. While my initial question was “Why are people silent?” he felt that the better question was, “Why do people ever break the silence in the first place?” Although the organization does believe that the ultimate responsibility for the harsh conditions of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank lies with the Israeli public, Yehuda went to great lengths to explain to me why the majority of the public is not concerned about its government’s and military’s policies and how, in his opinion, it’s understandable. He believes it’s a survival mechanism that all of humanity is guilty of. He explained, “When you don’t look good, you don’t spend a lot of time looking in a mirror” (Shaul). And that is why, as he put it, “Read my lips: There will never be a majority of Israelis like me. A significant minority, yes, but not a majority” (Shaul). But he insisted that they were still vital to Israel for the following reason: “We’re important for when the [conflict-related] change will come, so there are enough Israelis like us to help the transition, which is the most important part” (Shaul).

There was another factor as well that makes Israel quite different from its neighbors, something that would not have ever occurred to me without the help of a friend. A friend of mine named Ron is currently serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. She helped me see the vital difference between early adulthood in Israel as compared to other parts of the world more clearly. It is common knowledge that Israel has compulsory military service for all able-bodied men and women starting from the age of eighteen. Although there are ways to get around military service, and the numbers of people opting out of military service are increasing more and more as time goes by, it is still true that an enormous percentage of adults spend their first years of adulthood in military service. These are the same years when in most other countries of the world, people who are fortunate enough to attend university do so. Often, these are also the years when adults have the most free time, energy, financial stability to devote to important causes, which is a significant reason why the Arab Spring protests have been led by young students. Most Israelis, on the other hand, spend the same years in military service, when they obviously do not have the time, energy, or in some cases even a legal basis for protesting their government’s policies. Most Israelis attend university after their military service is over, which makes them older, more tired, and eager to move on with their lives. The incentive to protest is much lower and it makes sense. It’s human nature after spending years in grueling military service to want some “me-time,” to spend free time on personal growth and discovery, or even just to waste some of it in front of the TV or a computer screen, not to be out on the streets protesting. And interestingly enough, Yehuda said something similar. At one point he expressed the opinion of many Israelis regarding Israel’s problems, “Give me a break, man, I want to live my life!” (Shaul).

The incredible amount of apathy in Israeli society was a common theme I heard from almost everyone I spoke to in Israel. Gideon Levy, a controversial left-wing Israeli journalist I met with, believed that there has been extraordinary amounts of apathy in Israel over the last ten years, and that this apathy, when combined with the positive perceptions of the Israeli economy, were integral to the lack of mass protests in Israel. Professor Avner Faingulernt, whom I will later quote at length, put it slightly differently. He also expressed a thought similar to that of Ron and many others I spoke to. He believes that “there is not enough motivation to protest here. They feel like they have so much to lose” (Faingulernt).

This brings up a concept closely related to apathy: selfishness. I spoke to one girl at Tel Aviv University named Noa, who specifically said her opinion of why there weren’t mass protests in Israel was because most Israeli students, the main demographic leading the protests in the Middle East and beyond, are apathetic, egotistical and selfish. While those are very broad statements that I believe are inaccurate when applied to an entire population, there could be some truth to it. Many people said similar things to me about current Israeli society, and Gideon Levy attributed the apathy to the last ten years, around the time when the first affects of Israel’s neo-liberal economic policies started to be seen. The idea that intensely individualistic neo-liberal capitalism engenders feelings of selfishness and apathy, even in a society firmly rooted in socialistic communal values like Israel, makes a lot of sense to me, and should not be ignored.

One of the people I met who best communicated her frustration with the Israeli political system to me was a cab driver in Jerusalem named Yehudit. She, like many other Israelis, spoke of the apathy in Israel with bitterness. And she said that in her opinion, the difference between the autocratic Egypt political system and Israel’s was illusory. She told me, “There is no difference between Egypt and here. Yes, the government changes every two years [here], but it’s always the same people! Ehud Barak, for instance. No one wanted him, and Bibi [Netanyahu} neither!” And she had a point. Ehud Barak is a former Prime Minister, who was eventually thrown out of office and replaced by hard-liner Ariel Sharon because he was viewed as too much of a leftist friar during the failed 2000 Camp David Summit, in which he played a leading role. Yet he is the current Minister of Defense and a Deputy Prime Minister under the current right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu is serving as Prime Minister for the second non-consecutive term and who has previously served as a Minister of Finance and a Minister of Foreign Affairs, two extremely unrelated fields. At that point in my conversation with Yehudit, I mentioned Shimon Peres, the current ceremonial President of Israel. Shimon Peres has served as the head of various ministries in the Israeli government for almost half a century, not to mention his own two (or, depending on if you include a few months as Interim Prime Minister in 1977, three) terms as Prime Minister. At the mention of Shimon Peres’ name, we both were so exasperated at how in-bred Israeli politics are that we burst out laughing.

However, Gideon Levy had a very different take on the in-bred nature of Israeli democracy. While he agreed with me and Yehudit that Israel’s government was comprised of the same people over and over again, he maintained that it was not despite the wishes of the general public, rather that it was because of the wishes of the general public. And he also had a point. If the public did not want the same people in their governments over and over again, why do they keep re-electing the same people?

This brings up another interesting and I believe vital point. Despite having an overwhelmingly right-wing government in power, many right-leaning Israelis told me that the media and the elitists running most of the important institutions in Israel are exceedingly left in terms of the conflict and are succeeding in swaying the country in that direction. Zohar was a perfect example of someone who expressed such sentiments. And of course, I also heard many left-leaning Israelis expressing similar statements about the right. It made me reconsider a lot of givens I had about Israeli society. It made me think that perhaps Israel was actually, in its own way, balanced regarding its political inclinations. However, now that I have had some time to take a step back from my time there this past summer, I believe there is still an enormous hole in the rightists’ perspective. Likud and Yisrael Beitenu, the current two largest political parties making up the coalition government, are respectively right-wing and far right-wing. To put it mildly, this simple fact makes me highly doubtful of claims that the Israeli government, media and society actually lean to the left.

Interestingly enough, in the months leading up to July 2011, in the eyes of many Israelis, there wasn’t much to be protesting against. I cannot even begin to describe how many people seemed shocked at the idea of Israelis protesting en masse against anything. When I would ask Israelis why there are no mass protests in Israel, more than half the time people would respond, “Why would we protest? We have it pretty good here!” To quote Zohar, “I don’t think anyone’s starving here” (Zohar). Every once in a while, someone would respond, “Yes! We should be out on the streets! Why aren’t we?” To be fair, economically-speaking, there were reasons both for Israelis to protest and to celebrate. I spoke to an economic student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem named Beni who explained to me that there is actually a lot of money coming into the Israeli economy from foreign investors, encouraged by the billions of American dollars pouring into Israel, as Israel is widely known to be the number one recipient of American foreign aid in the world. Beni believed this is misleading, however, because he believed it makes Israel’s economy seem larger than it really is. He believed Israel’s economic prosperity is an illusion, that Israel is in the midst of a financial bubble, and that “there’s an illusion that the status quo will last forever, but it can’t. I think it’s gonna change next year” (Beni). This was before the tent protests against Israel’s neo-liberal policies sprouted up throughout the country and I have not been able to contact him since to see if his opinions have changed. Although he correctly predicted that Israel’s economic stability and public satisfaction was temporary, he did not think anything like the tent protests would happen. He specifically told me he thought the only thing that would cause Israelis to go out into the streets was a catastrophe, something along the lines of the Second Lebanon War of 2006, which is widely regarded in Israel as highly-mismanaged. And he was not the only one to think so. Gideon Levy expressed to me his belief that one of the many reasons for the lack of mass protests in Israel was that the economic situation in Israel was too good. A student at Ben Gurion University named Ehud told me that although he wished there were more mass protests about the conflict, he believed the economy was doing quite well and that “we are satisfied and comfortable” (Ehud).

However, this can be debated based on a significant amount of statistical data regarding Israel’s economy. Poverty in Israel is significant, to quite an alarming extent for a state that is a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is supposed to consist of states with relatively strong and egalitarian economies. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel puts it the best:

Israel’s level of economic inequality is one of the highest among developed countries. In 2011, Israel was ranked fifth in unequal income distribution among the 34 OECD countries, with the United States ranking fourth and Chile ranking first (OECD data, 2011). Israel’s level of economic inequality is a remarkable 22% higher than the average in OECD countries (National Insurance Institute data, 2009).

It goes on to provide statistics regarding general poverty in Israel.

One in every four residents in Israel lives below the poverty line, more than twice the average of Western countries (the average poverty rate in developed countries is 11.1%). Israel has the second highest poverty rate among OECD countries (OECD data, 2011). The total number of the nation’s impoverished is 1.7 million people.

The Association acknowledges that there are particularly high rates of poverty among the Ultra-Orthodox and Palestinian-Israelis in Israel, who for various reasons do not live as wealthily as much of the rest of the nation. This is very likely an accurate explanation of such high incidents of poverty in a largely First-World country, although due to the destabilizing effects of deregulation in the United States and throughout the rest of the world, I maintain that it is unlikely that these two populations have singlehandedly explain Israel’s high poverty rates. When I would raise these issues of poverty and economic inequality with Jewish Israelis, many, though far from all, would automatically respond by saying, “but that’s just from Arabs and Charedim [ultra-orthodox Jews]!” as if they didn’t represent the real Israel. This highlights the frightening extent to which two demographically large and politically significant groups are kept on the fringe of Israeli society.

Regardless of the actual state of the Israeli economy, I believe it can safely be said that it was the positive perceptions of the Israeli economy that kept people from protesting en masse before mid-July 2011. The Israeli economy did not in fact change drastically during July 2011, just the perception of it.

Not everyone was in denial of Israel’s economic and social problems before the tent protests. Obviously this is so; otherwise the tent protests would never have occurred in the first place. One economics student from Tel Aviv University named Tali was particularly aware of these problems, especially those that affect the secular population. Religious students studying at religious institutions, called yeshivot, are given substantial subsidies by the State for their studies and their livelihoods. If they are ultra-orthodox, many of these people do not serve in the army and actively choose not to work while surviving off of significant government subsidies that provide for them and their often large families in order for the males in the family to study Torah. This is often seen as a grave injustice by secular Israelis, most of whom do serve their country through service in the army and work to provide for their families without relying solely on government subsidies. These are general issues in all of Israeli society, but it is particularly relevant in terms of secular university studies in Israel. Tali explained to me that soldiers do receive some financial help from the army upon the completion of their military service, but that it is not nearly enough. There are two options for the soldiers to choose from. The first is called Ma’anak, which has no stipulations as to its use. According to Tali, from when she left the army, it is worth only a few hundred dollars, substantially less than the other option, the Pikdon. She estimated her Pikdon to be about 13,000 shekels, which would come out to a few thousand dollars, depending on when you calculated the exchange rate. The Pikdon, unlike the Ma’anak, has stipulations. It has to be used for something productive, such as university education, or to start up a business. Many people use it towards a university education. However, there’s a catch. In order to be accepted into an Israeli university, you have to take a standardized test similar to the SAT called the Psychometry. Courses have been created to prepare potential students for the Psychometry, and they improve results. As a result, the tests keep getting harder and harder, so the need for Psychometry courses is always growing. And as a result, the courses can charge as much as they want, because very few people are willing to take the Psychometry exams without the course. Tali estimated the cost of the course to be about 7,000 shekels, which is over half the amount of the Pikdon. All that is left for tuition and room and board for students is 6,000 shekels, which at the current exchange rate isn’t even $2,000. While it is true that higher education in Israel is substantially cheaper than in the United States, $2,000 is still not enough for multiple years of tuition and room and board at a university in Israel. For people like Tali, whose family was able to help her out a little bit financially in her education, this is not that big of a deal. But for many lower class families in Israel, this is a very serious threat to their ability to acquire a higher education. And even though Tali was not as harmed by this as many other Israelis were, it is of the utmost importance for her. As she told me, “This inequality is so big and central in our lives, we cannot [do anything]. I feel really small against this big government that’s corrupted. I really wish the government could really see us as an investment, and not as a burden.” Though of course, she does admit that she could do something about the problem if she and other secular Israelis like her changed their lifestyle, which is yet another sign of the extent to which apathy and selfishness curbs social protest and change in Israel.

Tali also believed I was “100% right” in my belief that Israelis are self-censuring themselves for the sake of national unity. Though, interestingly enough, Gideon Levy did not see it that way. From his perspective, adult Israelis are already so unified behind the idea of Israeli nationalism due to their army experience and what he referred to as “years of brainwashing” that there is no need for Israelis to censure themselves in order to create a false sense of nationalism because it already exists. I believe in this case, however, that Mr. Levy is mistaken. While there is rampant Israeli nationalism, I have already established the lengths to which the Israeli nation is not united. I also believe that the Israeli nationalism that does exist does only exist out of the willful ignorance of certain basic inequalities in daily Israeli life. One may call it brainwashing, but I believe that at the end of the day, the individual does not turn a blind eye to what he sees for himself because someone else wants him to, but because he himself wants to.

Sapir College in Sderot, Israel has a highly-regarded, although controversial, Cinema and Television Arts department. The department has a reputation in Israel for being particularly left-wing, and critical of the Israeli government. There have even been threats by the government to cut its government funding, though it has never happened. I met with the head of the department, Professor Avner Faingulernt, about a month before the protests started. Not surprisingly, he had many profound insights regarding the nature of Israeli society and why, before July 2011, it was not conducive to mass protests. First of all, he expressed eloquently what can easily be seen in current Israeli culture and throughout Israel’s history: that Israel has chosen to see itself as something very separate from the rest of the Middle East, or in other terms, from the Arab World. “Most Israelis don’t consider themselves to be part of the Arab world. Israel is in a condition of total denial. There is no acceptance in Israel of where we are really located. We try to pretend we are more than the Arab culture. We try to be different from the Arabs” (Faingulernt).⁶ There are many Israeli Jews whose ancestors never left the Middle East, but there is substantial evidence indicating that even these so-called Mizrachim do not consider them part of the Arab World anymore after years of assimilation into the Ashkenazi-dominated Israeli society. Because of this denial, Faingulernt believes that “students in Israel do not feel they have any reason to be a part of it [the revolutions]. They think the Arab Spring is another threat to them.” But it’s more than that. He expressed a thought similar to one of Yehuda’s and Ehud’s, another mention of Israeli apathy, of a disconnect with economic and political reality. “People are afraid of revolutions. It’s much more convenient not to confront reality.” (Faingulernt). Not surprisingly, he himself is very critical of the state, and of the Israeli student population that, at time, had not done much to show any discontent regarding its government’s policies. “The average Israeli student identifies with the policies of this country. They just believe what the state tells them” (Faingulernt). He believed the Israeli student population contrasted starkly with the student populations throughout the Middle East that bore an enormous share of the responsibility in the Arab Spring uprisings. “For me they are heroes. I hope they will teach the world, especially Israel, what is democracy, what is civil society. We don’t have civil society here” (Faingulernt). As for what kind of society and government Israel does have now, Professor Faingulernt believes “we have a semi-military regime. The regime is very nationalistic but the culture is more democratic. However, it’s getting worse and worse. It’s getting more dangerous to be against the nationalistic regime.” Obviously this is not the whole truth. I met plenty of students who disagreed with Israeli government policies. And once the tent protests started, many students played important roles in them as well.

One set of protests that did exist before July 2011 was protests to pressure the Israeli government to do more to release Gilad Shalit. Gilad Shalit was an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in 2006. Subsequently in October 2011, he was released in a prisoner-swap deal with Hamas. However, at the time I was there, there was a movement of people quite angry with the government’s inability to do anything to secure Gilad’s release. Gilad’s family and supporters had constructed a tent right outside the residence of Prime Minister Netanyahu in Jerusalem, and there were people there every day to show support for the movement. I even saw Gilad’s father, Noam, there. However, interestingly enough, these protests were very nationalistic in nature, and they supported the nationalist narrative that the Israeli nation was united, that Gilad’s suffering was the suffering of every Israeli. There was even a large photo montage in the tent with a mug shot of Gilad as a prisoner that Hamas sent out. Surrounded by the photo of Gilad were hundreds of pictures of other Israelis in the exact same pose. And yet, despite these signs of solidarity, some people in the tent even admitted that the truth was more complicated. I spoke to an old man in the tent named Asher. He came to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv specifically to come to the tent, and he spoke bitterly about the ignorance that he saw in Israeli society. He said that in Tel Aviv, nobody knows about the tent, and none of the youth care that he is imprisoned. That was very interesting, and while it could be true to a certain extent, it was not my experience at all. I have met many Israeli youths who cared deeply about Gilad’s captivity and spoke about it at length. And yet, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy also had a more cynical view of the various Gilad Shalit protests that were not very large in numbers, but did happen in many cities throughout Israel before his release. He considered them a joke, because the protests were not very large, and in his opinion, outside of Gilad’s family, nobody cared all that much. As he put it, people may put a picture of Gilad as their profile picture on Facebook to show solidarity with him, but by itself, that’s not exactly a sign of a deep level of commitment to a cause.

The tent protests that started in mid-July were though. I am hesitant to write too much about the tent protests, considering that they started after I left Israel (even if it was only by a few days). It started out as people putting up tents in Tel Aviv protesting against the high cost of housing. I have even heard that it did not even start out as a protest, but simply as a bunch of people setting up tents to temporarily live in because they could not afford any permanent housing, but I cannot verify this. Gradually more and more people became attracted to the protests until there was a tent city on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv and there were protests in every major Israeli city, and even many smaller ones demanding tzedek chevrati, or social justice. This is a rather vague demand, causing a friend of mine to write a Facebook status mocking the spirit of the protests, “Ha’am! Doresh! Kol miney dvarim….” or “The people! Demand! All kinds of things…” Because it was not always entirely clear what the specific demands of the movement were, no large component of Jewish Israeli society was alienated, which caused them to have the support of as much of the nation as possible. And to a certain extent, they succeeded. According to Ha’aretz, there were protests on the night of September 3, 2011 that managed to attract 450,000 people throughout the country. For a country with a population of around 7 million, that’s around six percent of the entire country. In the mass protests that did eventually occur in Israel, unity and numbers was tellingly placed before specific demands.

Despite the vague nature of the protests, the general consensus was widely considered to be a mass rejection of the neo-liberal economic policies in Israel and anger at the corruption rampant throughout the Israeli government. As of late October 2011, the protests have died down a bit, likely due to the Palestinian Authority’s bid for permanent membership in the United Nations, and due to the recent prisoner exchange that brought Gilad Shalit home. But there are still more protests planned. And even more interesting is that these tent protests in Israel started months before the similar Occupy Movement started in the United States and subsequently spread out to the rest of the world. They both are mass movements of people coming to live on the streets in parts of urban areas to protest economic problems. This is why I believe it is not a stretch to say that the tent protests in Israel inspired the entire Occupy Movement, and that the Israeli tent protests were part of a much larger global struggle against current economic trends and political suppression.

In the end, I can safely say there were several reasons why there were no mass protests in Israel during my time there. There were people who did not choose to see Israel in economic or political dire out of a concern for the unity of the people. There were the oft-cited growing levels of apathy and, according to some people, selfishness, in the Israeli population. There was the sense that things could not change for the better without a major cramp in their lifestyle. There were those who did not want to be associated with the chaotic and occasionally violent regime changes in the Arab World out of fears of personal security, financial security, or even racism. There’s the fact that Israel, despite its many problems, still remains more democratic and economically stable and prosperous than other nations in the Middle East and the world as a whole. And then of course, there’s the fact that Israel is such a diverse and heterogeneous society that without the perception of an enemy that could destroy them at any moment, Israeli society couldn’t be unanimous on much anything. However, despite all of these truths, the tent protests did break out in mid July 2011, and they haven’t been completely eradicated yet. Perhaps real political and economic change can come to Israel some day.

1. The statuses of the aforementioned regimes are as of October 2011. [↩]
2. Because even the choice of how to name the conflict betrays a political bias, the aforementioned conflict will be referred to from here on as simply “the conflict.” [↩]
3. By nation, I mean the collective entity of the people of Israel, or in Hebrew the Am. It is different from the state, which is a governmental entity quite separate from the collective identity of the people. [↩]
4. By religiosity, I mean the level of religious observance within a given religion. [↩]
5. Such anecdotes provide a good example of why I decided, against my better judgment, to significantly, though not completely; curb the focus of this piece away from the Palestinian-Israeli perspective of the political and economic situation in Israel. Palestinian-Israelis are unfortunately often ignored in examinations of Israeli society, and I do not wish to contribute to such a terrible trend. However, given the extent of the dissension within Jewish Israeli society, and that an examination of the Palestinian-Israeli perspectives regarding these societal issues would be enough for an entire paper on its own, I feel that an inclusion of the Palestinian-Israeli perspective in this piece would add content at the cost of focus and clarity. I’m not prepared to pay that price, and for this reason, I have largely left Palestinian-Israeli perspectives out of this work. [↩]
6. This comes from two main sources. The first one is the European-based culture of the Chalutzim, or pioneers, who made up the first waves of Jewish (re)immigration to Palestine in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century and who created a basis for Israeli culture that still exists today. The other one, of course, is the continuing Israeli-Palestinian/Arab-Israeli conflict, which has only engendered further bitterness and racism in Israeli Jews against the generically called “Arabs.” [↩]