The Social Origins of Israeli Unrest
Max Ajl, a frequent Jacobin contributor, has a new piece over at Jadaliyya.
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.