For Israel’s housing protest to succeed, it must be defined as political – and it must be translated into political acts. The issues it raises must be placed at the center of Israel’s democratic life. The argument over who gets what must find expression within political parties and elections
IOA Editor: This domestic Israeli (Jewish and largely middle-class) housing campaign is rapidly spreading and may well threaten the stability of Netanyahu’s government.
However, so far, demonstration activists and their leaders have dealt with the housing crisis outside of any political context. They didn’t discuss the dramatic discrepancy between Israel’s domestic and West Bank housing development policies, let alone make the connection between Israeli governments’ (past and present) high priory for settlement construction and low priority for domestic development – both designed to increase the size of the settlement population. Similarly, they didn’t include Israeli Palestinians — whose community has suffered a far greater housing shortage for decades — in their national campaign.
This ‘missing’ context is a true reflection of the extent of this Israeli-Jewish struggle. It is also likely to constrain the significance of any ‘success’ resulting from this campaign.
By Michal Shamir, Haaretz – 27 July 2011
www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/more-political-than-politics-1.375476
For Israel’s housing protest to succeed, it must be defined as political – and it must be translated into political acts. The issues it raises must be placed at the center of Israel’s democratic life. The argument over who gets what must find expression within political parties and elections.
The housing protest is political. Politics, as communications theorist Harold Lasswell once explained, is about “who gets what, when and how.” Every action taken to influence policy is politics. Thus there is nothing more political than the tent camps springing up around the country.
The housing protest also makes a clear left-wing statement. In the world of political ideas, demands for social justice, the state’s responsibility for its citizens’ welfare, reducing social gaps, and equality are the very essence of the left. Even in the realm of practical politics, these are the issues at the center of the political battle in most of the world’s democracies. These issues are the main difference between parties in the elections and constitute the basis for the accepted definitions of left and right.
Why isn’t this obvious? Because in Israel, “left” means being a dove and in favor of peace and compromise with the Palestinians, while “right” means being a hawk and swearing by the greater Land of Israel. Ever since the Six-Day War in 1967, the party system, politics and the political debate have been mired in the political divide defined by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This is particularly noticeable, and critical, in the socioeconomic realm, which is what defines politics in most countries. In Israel, there are no clear differences between the major parties on these matters.
The major parties do not propose realistic and well-thought-out alternatives. There is no ongoing, intelligent public debate that can help citizens understand the issues, formulate a coherent doctrine and then connect this to their party preference and their vote. Questions of socioeconomic policy are easily defined as professional matters, which politicians must never touch.
Since these controversial issues are not on the parties’ agenda or reflected in their election campaigns, the public’s preferences in these areas go unrepresented. The vast majority of the public is very far from its leaders and the neoliberal policies they have been implementing for years; most of the public wants an egalitarian social policy that reduces socioeconomic gaps. But these preferences find no expression in the Knesset, or in policy.
Almost 60 percent of the members of the 18th Knesset belong to parties that clearly espouse a neoliberal, capitalist position: Likud, Kadima and Yisrael Beiteinu, which together have 70 MKs. But the public is somewhere else entirely when it comes to socioeconomic policy, and many studies show that.
In the 2009 Israeli election survey, we repeated a question that we have asked for over 40 years: “When it comes to economic life in Israel, do you favor the socialist approach or the capitalist approach?” Among those who answered the question, 32 percent chose capitalism and 68 percent supported the socialist approach.
This is the lowest support for capitalism we have found since the Economic Stabilization Plan was launched in the mid-1980s. That plan marked a turning point in Israeli economic policy, from a policy with a socialist character to a liberal capitalist policy.
The 2009 survey also found that 74 percent of respondents thought “the government should be responsible for ensuring that everyone has a job and a reasonable standard of living”; only 9 percent thought that “the government shouldn’t intervene and everyone should look out for himself.”
The fact that the political parties and the political debate are locked into the divide of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is what has enabled Israel’s acute transformation – from a society that served as a global exemplar of solidarity and equality in the 1970s to a society so unequal that it rivals the United States – to proceed so smoothly and “naturally.”
Thus for the protest to succeed, it must be defined as political – and it must be translated into political acts. The issues the housing protests raise must be placed at the center of Israel’s democratic life. The argument over who gets what must return to the political foreground, which means it must find expression within the political parties and the elections.
Otherwise, it will once again be swallowed by the black hole of the dispute over the territories.
The author is a professor of political science at Tel Aviv University
RELATED Dror Etkes: If only Rothschild were a settlement
