The balance of power has changed. The public understands that it has power both vis-a-vis the government and vis-a-vis the monopolies and the cartels. The political discourse has changed.

Daphni Leef is a leader of the Israeli social protest movement. The first part of our entry is her speech at the mass rally (estimated at 300,000 protestors) in Tel-Aviv on September 3rd 2011. The second is an analysis by Nehemia Shtrasle that was distributed by Tikkun.

1. Daphni Leef:

Something massive, something huge happened this summer. Summer 2011 is the big summer of the new Israeli hope. This hope was born, like many hopes, out of a feeling of despair, alienation, inequalities that became impossible for all of us, inequalities that almost became impossible to overcome.

The Israeli society that stands here – and also, it’s important to note, also the Israeli society that chose to stay home this evening – reached its red line. And then it stood up and said: Enough! No more! You can cheat some of the people some of the time, but you can’t cheat everyone all the time. This summer we woke up and refused to keep walking with our eyes shut towards the abyss.

We are choosing to live. We are not invisible. If they only understand numbers, let us remind them that there are more than 7 million people here, and every one of these people has a heart. There was a sign on Rothschild that said: “Every heart is a revolutionary cell.” It’s true. Every one of us is the protest headquarters of one person.

This summer was a wonderful obstacle course. What hurdles didn’t they put before us? What didn’t they say about us? How they tried to break us up. The first thing they said about us was: spoiled brats. Sushi and nargilas. From this we learned that the automatic response of the publicly elected is to give not respect to our actions. Their first priority was to say – it’s nothing, zero, just a group of kids. At that point there was only the tent camp on Rothschild Boulevard. They called us vague and deluded. The result: tent camps began to be set up throughout the country. They had no choice but to understand that this was something bigger, something of our own.

My generation grew up with the feeling that we were alone in the world. It’s us versus the TV screen. That the other is our enemy, that he is our competitor. We grew up with the feeling that we are in living in a race we have no chance of winning, that we mustn’t rely on anyone else. They taught us that it’s either you or him. That’s capitalism – unending competition. The fact that this generation – the loneliest and withdrawn generation – stood up and did something is nothing short of a miracle. The miracle of the summer of 2011. There you have it – everything that we thought, all they taught us – was wrong! What happened here was exactly what needed to happen.

We were closed up each of us in his own cycle, a cycle of dissatisfaction, of a feeling of absurdity. And suddenly we began to talk, and more importantly: We began to listen.

So they called us the extreme left. They tried to define us. How on earth do they know who I am? How do they know who you are? Where do they get the chutzpah? The best answer to their assertions came not from me of from my friends, it came from the tent camps that sprang up in Hatikva neighborhood, in Jesse Cohen, in Kiryat Gat, Kiryat Shmona, Modiin, Rahat, Kalansawa, Jerusalem, Haifa, Bet Shean, Yerucham, and in tens of other places. All of us, the whole country, realized that there is no right or left – we are all servants/we all serve.

They told us – go to the periphery towns. What a terrible and condescending thing to say. What is that – “go to the periphery”? It’s something you say as if – there, there are no people. That there is a wasteland. Silence. And you know what? How lucky it is that they sent us to the periphery. Because we discovered there what we already knew – that this country is full of beating hearts. I went there and found friends for life.

And anyway – what is that – “go to the periphery”? The State of Israel screwed over and continues to screw over its periphery systematically and methodically from the moment it was established. In education, health, infrastructure, housing, welfare, culture – to say “go to the periphery” is unprecedented hypocrisy. To talk of ‘periphery’ is to perpetuate the old discourse that cuts out human beings, that tells them: You are put aside. You are remote. Your needs are less important and your demands are worth less. This summer we proved to everyone that there is no such thing as periphery – we are all central! Every single one of us! We reduced the physical distance between us and we found out that it’s good that way, that we want to remain close. That they will no longer manage to distance us and to divide us.
And then came the security escalation. But even the missiles that fell did not ruin this protest. The opposite – they showed how strong and true it is. The fact that we didn’t fold then was, I’ve already said this, the most moving aspect of this protest. The time has come for the concept “Security Situation” to stop being a value and return to being what it is – a situation. And a situation that must change.

Missiles fell, and we were silent for a few days. We marched in silence. And then what did they say? They said that the protest was fading out. Instead of recognizing that it pained us that a million Israelis were living under the threat of missiles, that we were hurting for the people injured, killed, and whose houses were ruined. But instead of appreciated that we were with them, instead of seeing how our silence came from love, they said “the protest is fading out”. They tried to turn our solidarity into retreat.

The truth is, it was sad. How on earth does the government of Israel dare to make such an attempt of divide and rule? A government that abandoned its residents; that abandoned its elderly, its sick, its immigrants, its weak. How can is now come to us with such an assertion? Israeli governments have divided us for years, and when finally we come together, when we showed that we are not willing to carry on sitting in front of the TV, they said that we are not showing solidarity. We don’t show solidarity? Look at what’s going on here!

When they talk about security they come to protect human lives – how does that line up with the Israeli government’s policy of recklessness?

I’m 25 years old. What are my biggest memories of this country: the 2nd Lebanon War, the period of terrorism, friends who were killed then, the assassination of Rabin, Gilad Shalit. And that’s even without going into that I’m 3rd generation Holocaust survivor. This was my consciousness. Moments and memories laced with death, loss, pain, fear, and the feeling that everything is temporary.

At the demonstration in Afula I saw a sign: “For 31 days I have been proud to be Israeli”. I stand before you and I am now proud to be an Israeli for 7 weeks. I feel we are together building here our self-worth as a society. To say “I deserve” means that someone else also deserves, that we deserve. This summer brought with it many good moments and memories – of hope, of change, fraternity, listening.

A discourse of life has been created. It’s the most important awakening there has been here. We are not here just to survive, we are here in order to live. We are not here just because we have nowhere else. We are here because we want to be here. We choose to be here, we choose to be in a good place, in a just society, we want to live in society as a society – not as a collection of lonely individuals who each sit in front of one box, the TV, and once every four years put a slip in another box – the polling box.

We are here, not because we have no other land. We are here because this is the land we want. Without our even noticing, people have begun to return from abroad, suddenly there’s a feeling that something’s happening here that mustn’t be missed.

We’ve created a new discourse here. This is the new discourse: We’ve replaced the word pity with the word compassion. We’ve replace the word charity with the word justice. We’ve replaced the word donation with the word welfare. We’ve replaced the word consumer with the word citizen. We’ve replaced the verb ‘to wait’ with the verb ‘to change’. We’ve replaced the word alone with the word together. This is the greatest thing that we’ve done this summer. I don’t know about you, friends, but it’s already irreversible. We’ll not agree to go backwards! We are striding forwards, to a better future, to a more just country. Social Justice!

We’re all of us imprisoned somehow in our social status, in our neighborhoods, in our religion, our gender. And then I realized that we’re not imprisoned – it’s that we’re imprisoning us! We all have an overdraft, but the overdraft is in the interest of the banks, it’s in the interest of the entire financial system of the state. They want to keep us constantly at a certain level of distress. Because where there is distress there is no hope, and where there is no hope there is no chance of change, and where there is no chance for change there is nothing to live for. But this summer, day after day, week after week, we went out to the streets and clarified not just to the government, but also to ourselves, that there is something to live for! The moment we realized this, the moment we began to think about a shared tomorrow, we all set out to freedom!

What will tomorrow bring? We’re all asking what tomorrow will bring. What will happen to the tents, what is happening with the protest, where next and what to do and all that. All this demand for the fateful day, for the victory photo, for the decisive moment – there’s no such thing, my friends. Was there one fateful day when the social gaps became unbearable? Did swinish capitalism mark a particular moment of victory? Can we put our finger on that one privatization too many? There was no such moment. There was a process. Likewise now there is no moment – there’s a process. This process of ours is just beginning now. We have demands of the government and its head because things must change.
If you are a resident of Yerucham – things must change.
If you are a child whose parents have no money to pay for your school trip – things must change.
If you are a pensioner or holocaust survivor – things must change
If you are a Gaza evacuee – things must change
If you are Bedouin – things must change.

40% of us are defined as “financially fragile”. That means that 40% of us can’t cope with an unexpected outlay: dental care for the kid, a burst drain, injury. We are all living on the edge, by the skin of our teeth, pushed to take out another loan, to need more, to save less. Our lives have become a financial war of survival, while the state abandoned our pensions to games on the stock market, and privatized more and more of the basic services.

You know what’s the worst phrase? The small citizen. There are laws against insulting a public servant, but there are no laws against insulting the citizens. And they’ve insulted us enough over the past few years. They’ve pushed us towards poverty, played with us, split us from each other. Don’t know about you, but I don’t like it when they laugh at me, and I don’t like it when they play me along.

The citizen is not small! The citizen is the largest there is! To be a citizen, a large citizen, and to understand this, is the greatest challenge that stands before us. The demands of this protest are exactly based on the understanding that we are not willing to be small citizens any more, consumers, we are not willing to be a target audience any more, just a sector, just a tenth. We will no longer hole up in our tiny bunkers and wage our war of existence alone.

That era is over.

From now on something new: From now on we are together. We demand change, and we demand to be part of that change.

We have begun a new discourse, a discourse of hope, of sharing, of solidarity and responsibility. I want to ask the Prime Minister, to ask all the politicians: Look at what happened here, at what is happening here – is this what you want to defeat? Is this something you are able to defeat? You are the People’s representatives. Listen to the People. This protest, that gave so much hope to many people – do you want to break this hope? Is that what you want? To melt down the hope? You will never succeed!

And after we jumped all the hurdles and all the spin didn’t succeed, what did they have left? To attack me. This thing started with one person who did something. I set up my tent on Rothschild out of a personal feeling of to be or not to be. A person very close to my heart, Alex, put an end to his life. He was a poet. He wrote that even if you have a heart of gold, you will not manage to change the world. Two months before all this started up, he couldn’t be here any longer, and he chose not to be.

How can a person like that, a dreamer and an idealist, feel that he no longer has a place in this world? If he has no place in this world then I suppose I have no place here either. And my heart hurt. My heart was broken. What kind of a world is it that has no room for dreamers, idealists, poets? What kind of world cuts them out? A world of poverty. Because all of us are dreamers and we all have the right to dream. To be poor isn’t only not managing to make it to the end of the financial month or to be homeless. To be poor is to be troubled by these things, fundamentally, to such an extent that you are not able to dream, to think, to learn, to hug your children.

So I started this thing. But just because I started it doesn’t mean it’s mine only. It’s not just my story, it’s the story of many people who stood up and started walking, stood up and began to do something. We all decided to be. We decided to be here. Here we are.

This summer we learned that we all of us have a place. That tomorrow will be what we make of it. We don’t need them to define us, we know full well who we are. And after this summer we know that it’s okay to dream. More than that. We understood that we must dream! To dream is to be.

7 weeks ago I was a 25 year-old who was struggling alone with her private dreams – to make movies. In the past week I’ve been attacked from all sides, and they almost managed to make me feel alone again. Don’t know about you, but I’ve just started my protest…

I’ll be here as long as necessary. I want to show Alex that yes, you can change the world, that everyone can. You only need to believe, get up, and do something. The responsibility is on each and every one of us. To stand up and move and talk and do and not give up.

In taking to the streets, we found home!”

2. Analysis by Nehemia Shtrasle:

“Public pressure has effected change. National Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau has capitulated and been forced to sign an order lowering the gasoline retailers’ profit margins by 19 agorot per liter. This is a significant decrease, and one that Landau truly did not want to sign. Over the past two years, he has become an enthusiastic supporter of the wealthy and of large monopolies, and he has forgotten his role representing the public.

In fact, in early 2010, Landau took steps to dismiss the chairman of the Energy Authority, Amnon Shapira, simply because he dared to instruct the Israel Electric Corporation, a monopoly, to reduce its tariffs after cheap natural gas was introduced to its production system. Later, he waged war on the Sheshinski committee to prevent it from raising taxes, to the degree that it recommended, on oil exploration companies. Now he has stood behind large fuel corporations and for months prevented their exaggerated profit margin from being lowered – that is, until the social protest movement defeated him.

For many years, the large fuel companies collected an excessive profit margin, accumulating enormous profits at the expense of the public. But in January, after the price of gasoline passed the NIS 7 mark, public outcry erupted, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed Landau to examine the fuel companies’ profit margin. Landau appointed a committee that determined the margin must be lowered by 21.5 agorot per liter – but then he refused to accept the committee’s recommendation, accepting all kinds of fabricated claims proffered by the fuel companies.

The companies also approached ministers and Knesset members from Likud, asking them to put presure on Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz to save them from the abhorrent decree, but Steinitz declined. The companies frightened their employees by threatening that, if the margin was lowered, they would have to become more “efficient”- which is to say, they would be dismissed – and the terrified workers held a demonstration. Ofer Eini, chairman of the Histadrut labor federation, also intervened to prevent the margin from being lowered. Eini of course knows how to speak in lofty terms about the high cost of living, but when it comes to actions, he supports the big workers’ committees and, in this case, the committees at the Paz, Delek and Sonol companies – and, through them, the wealthy people who control those companies.

However, when the pressure continued to mount, Landau discovered the real culprit: the treasury. According to Landau, the Finance Ministry is “the biggest tycoon that exists,” since it takes 53 percent of the price of gasoline in taxes. It is true that the Finance Ministry takes a great many taxes, but where do these taxes go? They are earmarked, for example, to provide many billions of shekels for the cost of the settlements, an expenditure that Landau actually supports. They are earmarked for the increase in the Israel Defense Forces’ budget, so that it can be ready for any operation or war forced upon us, since Landau is not prepared to even dream of any peaceful solution to the conflict that entails giving up territories. The taxes also go toward supporting new immigrants from the former Soviet Union, which Landau also is in favor of, since they vote for the Yisrael Beiteinu party. If all this is so, why does he complain that the taxes are so high?

One thing is certain: Without the social protest movement, the fuel companies’ profit margin would not have budged by even one agora. Until the drivers started raising their voices, the Fuel Authority kept quiet, and so did the Finance Ministry. But it is not only the fuel companies who understand now that the rules of the game have changed. The entire economy understands. The supermarket chains would not have dropped the price of cottage cheese from NIS 7.3 to NIS 5.9 were it not for the social protest organized on Facebook. Nochi Dankner, who has the controlling share in Super-Sol, would not have met with a group of young people who threatened a boycott and would not have promised to bring down prices. The CEO of Super-Sol, Efi Rosenhaus, would not have hastened to meet with a few students from Tel Aviv University and vowed to lower the prices of 30 items by 20 percent. And lo and behold, Mega too is lowering the price of 32 basic products.

Of course, we have not forgotten about the promises made by Netanyahu immediately after the protests began to build cheap housing, nor have we forgotten about the Trajtenberg committee, which is planning to introduce changes in the areas of taxation, competition, cost of living and apartment prices. In other words, the balance of power has changed. The public understands that it has power both vis-a-vis the government and vis-a-vis the monopolies and the cartels. The political discourse has changed, and it will have an influence on the results of the next elections.”

For further information, analysis and media see ROAR Mag’s J14 culminates into largest protest in Israeli history