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The protest against social conditions in Israel

mardi 2 août 2011

Jewish, Arab workers and youth protest against social conditions in Israel

1 August 2011

An estimated 150,000 mostly young people in Israel, both Jewish and Arab, protested Saturday over spiralling living costs and the economic and social policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The demonstrations—held in eleven cities, with the largest in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa—mark a significant development in the “tent city” movement against high housing costs launched by students nearly three weeks ago. With a total population of about 7 million, 150,000 people represents a large percentage of the country.

While still in its early stages, a movement within the Israeli working class is being driven by worsening social inequality, economic hardship, and enormous anger with the Netanyahu government and the existing political setup in the country.

Yediot Aharonot columnist Nahum Barnea described the protests as unprecedented. “Whether the crowds numbered 100,000 or 200,000, never have such numbers descended into the streets over social issues,” he wrote. “Who would have believed that 150,000 Israelis would take the trouble to go out into the street in the name of social change… the alienation and cynicism that typified the public in the past number of years has now been replaced by involvement and protest.”

The largest protest was in Tel Aviv, where up to 100,000 people marched through the city centre. According to media reports, another 10,000 rallied in Jerusalem outside the prime minister’s residence and 8,000 marched in Haifa. A smaller demonstration in central Nazareth involved both Jews and Arabs, the first such joint rally since the housing protests began.

Slogans included : “The people demand social justice”, “We want justice, not charity”, and “When the government is against the people, the people are against the government”. Protestors also made banners pointing to the influence of the recent uprisings in Egypt and other Arab countries. One read : “This is the Israeli spring”, and another, “Mubarak, Assad, Netanyahu !”

One young person was asked by the RT news network whether the protests had been inspired by events in Arab countries. He replied, “There is a lot of influence of what happened in Tahrir Square… There’s a lot of influence of course. That’s when people understand that they have the power, that they can organise by themselves, they don’t need any more the government to tell them what to do, they can start telling the government what they want.”

These developments presage a major shift within the Zionist state. Amid a worsening global economic breakdown, the social crisis in Israel is laying bare the objective potential for unifying Jewish workers with their Arab brothers and sisters both within Israel and throughout the Middle East. Opening up is a new path of political and social struggle, in opposition to the Zionist ruling elite, the Arab bourgeoisie and their imperialist backers—on the basis of common class interest, not nationality, race or religious identity.

Wider layers of the Israeli population are being drawn into the protest movement. Prominent musicians and writers have joined the demonstrations. Yesterday about 1,000 parents and their young children participated in a “strollers’ march” in Jerusalem and Haifa to protest against excessive day care centre costs and inadequate parental leave provisions.

A strike of public hospital medical professionals is in its fifth month. On Sunday, hundreds of doctors, medical residents and hospital interns protested near the Knesset (parliament) demanding adequate funding for the public health system.

Today, local authority workers are set to strike in support of the antigovernment protests, shutting down public offices and leaving rubbish uncollected.

The Netanyahu government has been plunged into crisis. A comment published by Ynet News columnist Attila Somfalvi noted : “Some 150,000 people who left their homes yesterday directed their fury at the man who they view as the culprit behind the State’s privatisation and burial of concern for the regular folk. These are not a bunch of ‘spoiled brats’ who can be dismissed with a disparaging hand gesture or by rolling one’s eyes ; these are working people ; angry people facing collapse... This protest is making its way to the top of the government, shakes up Likud, rocks the leather chairs in the Knesset and makes the prime minister and finance minister sweat and seek an escape route from the fury pouring into the street.”

The Shas party, which represents ultra-orthodox Jews and has 11 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, has warned it may withdraw from Netanyahu’s coalition government, potentially triggering new elections.

The prime minister has rushed to try to defuse the protest movement. Immediately after Saturday’s demonstrations Netanyahu called a cabinet meeting and announced that a “special team” of ministers and experts would listen to the protest leaders and submit a plan to “alleviate Israelis’ economic burden”. He declared : “We are all aware of the genuine hardship of the cost of living in Israel… we must deal with the genuine distress, seriously and responsibly. This, without a doubt, compels us to change our list of priorities.”

This hollow rhetoric has been accompanied by various sops in response to the protestors’ demands. Last Tuesday, Netanyahu promised to build 50,000 units of housing within 18 months. The government yesterday announced that the excise tax on petrol is to be lowered for one month, during August, and that some elderly people will have their home heating grant doubled. The prime minister has also suggested that he hopes to cut taxes and water charges.

At the same time, Netanyahu has made clear that there will be no serious concessions to the social demands of the protesting workers and youth. “We must avoid irresponsible, hasty and populist steps that are liable to cause the country to deteriorate into the situation of certain European countries, which are on the verge of bankruptcy and large-scale unemployment,” he declared.

Finance minister and senior Likud member Yuval Steinitz raised the spectre of state bankruptcy even more sharply. “We see the talk about the debt crisis in Europe,” he said. “We are even hearing talk of a possible default in the United States. My supreme duty is to ensure we do not reach this situation in the State of Israel... we will not turn the rich and the business people and the investors and the industrialists into the enemies of the people, because they are part of a healthy economy.”

The financial markets are clearly bringing enormous pressure to bear on the Netanyahu government, urging a continuation of pro-business policies irrespective of mass opposition. The value of Israeli government bonds declined after the weekend’s rallies. “Growing protests over rising prices increase pressure on the government to act,” Tel Aviv bond trader Ehud Itzhakov told Bloomberg. “There is concern in the market the government may need to raise more debt, which is creating uncertainty about the deficit.”

The Israeli Treasury Department is reportedly outraged over the government’s limited spending announcements in response to the protests. The director general of Israel’s finance ministry, Haim Shani, resigned yesterday. He cited “differences of opinion in fundamental issues” with the finance minister, adding that “events of the past few days have exacerbated the problems.”

It remains to be seen how the Netanyahu government responds to the crisis in the next days and weeks, but there is a real danger that a provocation will be launched against the Palestinian people or neighbouring Arab states as a diversion. Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar reportedly advised his Likud faction colleagues last week that every election in Israel that has “revolved around a socio-economic issue, Likud lost”, whereas when the main issues were “security related, Likud won.”

The growing protest movement of Israeli workers and youth against worsening economic hardship is a development of enormous political significance for the working class throughout the Middle East and internationally.

Protests against the unaffordable cost of housing erupted a fortnight ago, with young people erecting “tent cities” in different parts of Israel. The movement initially had a largely middle-class composition, with demonstrations centred on Tel Aviv’s grand Rothschild Boulevard, but far wider layers of students and youth are now involved and polls indicate that the protests are supported by about 90 percent of the population.

Sections of the working class are entering into struggle with the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Local authority workers are set to strike Monday in solidarity with the student protesters, shutting down public offices and leaving rubbish uncollected. More than 20,000 young workers have expressed their support on the Internet for a campaign to halt work on Monday. Doctors have been on strike for weeks, reflecting wider discontent among professional workers.

The Histadrut trade union federation—which, like its counterparts internationally, is complicit in the driving down of workers’ wages—is clearly under enormous pressure and has cautioned Netanyahu that it may need to call strikes in order to contain and head off the movement if he is unable to do so.

These developments underscore a basic fact that is ignored or denied by the bourgeois media, the middle-class “left,” and various nationalist and Islamist organisations throughout the Arab world : there is a working class in Israel. Its interests, moreover, are in ever more open conflict with those of the Israeli ruling class and all of the official institutions of Zionism.

The protests to date are only the initial expression of an emerging movement of the Israeli working class. What is developing within the Zionist state is an integral part of a broader process—the rise of mass social resistance throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

The revolutionary struggles in Egypt, Tunisia and other Arab states have been dominated not by religion or national identity, but rather by social questions—unemployment, poverty, inequality, access to education. Increasingly in these struggles, the working class has come to the fore. Now the workers in Israel are beginning to stir, driven into action by the same crisis and the same social issues.

What this points to is a new road of political and social struggle for the working class and oppressed masses of the Arab countries as well as Israel, in which the axis is social class, not nationality, race or religion.

Israel has always been a deeply divided country. But in the last two decades, successive Labor, Likud and Kadima governments have imposed sweeping “free market” and pro-business reforms—including the privatisation of state assets, banking and corporate deregulation, and the elimination of various employment protections.

The same measures have been imposed on workers in Egypt and many other Arab countries. In Israel, as in neighbouring countries, unprecedented social inequality has been the result, with workers’ real wages declining while a tiny elite has amassed enormous personal wealth. Discussion is now commonplace in Israel about the country’s new oligarchy, based on the wealthiest 20 families who control about half the stock market.

The protesting Israeli youth are clearly taking their lead from international developments. They have been inspired by both the European movements against austerity and spending cuts and the upheavals across the Middle East and North Africa—a significant matter, given that the Zionist establishment has portrayed these movements as dangerous disturbances threatening a regional Islamist takeover.

The fate of the uprisings in many countries across North Africa and the Middle East now hangs in the balance. In Egypt, for example, the hated dictator Hosni Mubarak is gone but his repressive regime remains in place, run by a military clique that is working closely with the US government. The question can be raised—who has proven to be the main enemy of the Egyptian workers and youth ? Not the Israeli working class, but the Egyptian bourgeoisie, backed by the Israeli ruling class and imperialism. The various representatives of the Egyptian ruling class, ranging from Mohamed ElBaradei to the Muslim Brotherhood, have rushed to defend the military as a bulwark against any challenge to existing capitalist property relations.

For decades, the political subordination of working class struggle in the Arab Middle East to the bourgeoisie in the name of “national unity” or “Arab unity” has produced one catastrophe after another. The extraordinary evolution of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)—from a mass movement that waged many courageous struggles against the murderous Israeli military machine to a right-wing apparatus that operates openly as an agency of US imperialism and the Zionist state—is the sharpest expression of the historical dead end of bourgeois nationalism.

The current crisis in Israel no less dramatically demonstrates the bankruptcy of the Zionist project. What was presented as a means of salvation for the Jews after the Nazi Holocaust is revealing itself ever more nakedly as a trap for the Jewish masses and a political vehicle for the enrichment of a narrow capitalist elite that depends upon continued subsidies from its American imperialist sponsors, ceaseless wars of aggression, and the ever more brutal exploitation of its own working class.

Who is the main enemy of the Jewish working class ? Not the Palestinian and Arab workers, but the Israeli ruling class and its political agents in the Knesset, as well as the trade unions, which are now seeking to place themselves at the head of the protest movement the better to strangle it.

Even before Israel was founded in 1948, and certainly in the six decades since, tensions between the Jewish and Arab peoples have been incited and exploited by the imperialist powers and by the ruling elites in Israel and the Arab states. Now, however, a new stage is developing in the crisis of world capitalism and a major shift in the balance of class forces internationally is under way. The objective conditions are emerging in which the unresolved historical problems of the 20th century can be resolved.

The fundamental dividing point between the peoples of the Middle East is not religion or race, but class. What is required is a united struggle of the working class throughout the region, based on a socialist and internationalist program that aims to abolish the profit system and establish the United Socialist States of the Middle East as part of a world socialist federation. (...)

Patrick O’Connor

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