The summer of 2011 saw Israelis pour into the streets in a wave of mass protests and street encampments in an often inchoate but heartfelt call for a society that better served its constituents. The protests came in the wake of the Arab Spring that had erupted across the Middle East in the months before and in many respects foreshadowed the Occupy Wall Street rallies that would begin shortly afterward in the USA and Europe. But the Israeli movement was very much in a sui generis phenomenon. A Facebook protest against the rising price of cottage cheese, a food that is a staple of the Israeli diet and for many is a symbol Israeliness, quickly grew into a consumer boycott. Street protests followed after a 25-year-old film editor pitched a tent in Tel Avivâs Habima Square to protest her inability to find affordable housing in the city. She was joined by others creating a tent city that rapidly spread up and down adjacent Rothschild Boulevard. Next came a series of rallies in Tel Aviv and elsewhere around the country that at their peak in early September drew close to half a million people in a country of about 7.5 million. 1 By then, the grievances had widened to encompass rising home prices and the high cost of living generally, the ineffectiveness of government , and growing inequality , not just in terms of income but in apportioning the burden of taxes and army service.
The character of the protests was something new for Israel. As much as they were subject to debate among the protesters themselves, the grievances principally addressed the concerns of the countryâs middle class , not of the poor or of the traditional interest groups around which Israeli politics is usually arrangedâultra-Orthodox Jews (Haredim ), West Bank settlers, Jews of Middle East and North African origin, and the countryâs Arab Palestinian minority. The middle-class character of the protest was symbolized by a series of demonstrations during the summer by young parents with their children dubbed the March of Strollers. A survey by the Israel Democracy Index (IDI), conducted in the wake of the protests, provided quantitative evidence of the protestsâ middle-class character. An annual measure of public attitudes toward government , society, and current affairs, it found that more than a quarter of all Israelis said they personally participated in the protests during the summer of 2011. 2 That figure, of course, is based a self-reported information and probably overstates the actual level, but given the actual turnout at the protests during that summer there can be little doubt that they drew a large part of the population. The IDI survey found that the crowds who gathered in Tel Aviv and other cities that summer were in the main from Israelâs middle- and upper-middle class . It found that among those who said they participated in the protests, the highest rates were those claiming âincome slightly above averageâ (40.0%) and âincome well above averageâ (32.2%). 3 The lowest rate was among those reporting âincome well under averageâ (16.5%).
Another important aspect of the Israeli social justice protests was that in contrast to their counterparts in the Arab world or in the USA and Europe they came amid a period of seeming peace and prosperity for the Jewish state. The last major spasm of violence that Israel had been forced to contend with was Second Intifada , which claimed more than 1000 Israeli and 5550 Palestinian lives, but by 2004â2005, it had wound down. In the following six years, Israel fought the 2006 Lebanon War and the 2008â2009 Operation Cast Lead offensive against the Palestinian-ruled Gaza Strip . But by Israeli standards, they were of no consequenceâshort conflicts that had no long-term economic effect and little psychological impact. Indeed, few if any of the voices of that summer were calling for Israel to reach an agreement with the Palestinians on the assumption that Israelâs perpetual state of war was an unacceptable economic burden that peace could solve. The economy had been enjoying unbroken growth since 2003, including the worst years of the global recession in 2008 and 2009. During the majority of those years, economic growth exceeded 4% annually and came close to 6% in two of them. 4 As the social protests were erupting in the third quarter of 2011, the unemployment rate had fallen to 5.5%, close to its lowest level in decades. Over the two decades prior to the 2011 social justice protests, Israelâs per capita income climbed into the ranks of the worldâs richest countries to reach $31,470, close to the average for European Union countries. 5 Life expectancy on average for Israelis was about 81.5 years in 2009, among the highest in the OECD . 6 During the years 2003â2012, the IDIâs annual poll asking Israelis to assess the countryâs âgeneral situationâ saw the percentage responding âvery goodâ or âpretty goodâ rise from 11.1 to 38.1% (although it should be noted that those answering âso soâ remained the single largest category). 7
In most respects, nothing has changed since 2011: The economy has continued to show strong top line economic growth and has demonstrated an enormous capacity for creating jobs. Real GDP growth averaged 3.8% annually in the years 2003 through 2014, well over twice the average for countries belonging to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) . 8 The unemployment rate was 5.3% on average in 2015, its lowest in three decades, even as more people entered the workforce and was much lower than the OECD average of 7.9%. 9 Long-term unemployment was 1.9%, the third lowest on the OECD . All of this marked a signal achievement for a country that has few natural resources, bears heavy defense costs, and lies in a regional of perpetual political instability. Just a generation earlier, few Israelis had any expectations that they would achieve Western levels of prosperity anytime in the foreseeable future.
The social protests faded out in the autumn of 2011 and efforts to revive them the following spring and summer failed. But that should not detract from their significance because they represented an economic and social angst that justifiably remains very much present in Israel. On a wide range of social and economic indicators, the countryâs performance relative to the worldâs wealthiest economies, which is properly Israelâs benchmark, has been poor. On a per capita basis, Israeli economic growth has outpaced OECD countries by a narrower margin of about 1.9 to 1 annually on average during 2003â2014. 10 Israel has narrowed the per capita GDP gap with the wealthiest OECD countries over the decade to 2014 by about a third, but in labor productivity it lags far behind and the gap has changed little, which points to structural problems the economy has yet to solve. 11 At 18.7% of the population, Israel had the second highest income poverty rate among OECD countries in 2013, and was well above the OECD average of about 11%, despite more than a decade of slower economic growth and much higher jobless rates in Europe. 12 Among all Israelis currently employed, some 37% reported that they found it âdifficultâ to live on their current income and 12% said they felt poor. 13 Israel society is characterized by unusually wide income inequality : Measuring the ratio between people in the highest and lowest income deciles, Israel is among the most unequal societies in the OECD . Only Mexico and the USA showed wider gaps. 14 While Israelis suffer unusually high housing costs, they also suffer more crowdedness (1.16 rooms per person on average versus 1.7 for all the OECD ). 15 The Israeli middle class , as defined by families earning between 75 and 125% of the countryâs median income, had been shrinking and on the eve of the social protests constituted barely half the population. 16 The cost of living for Israeli families, as a spate of media reports showed during and after the protests, is high relative to Western Europe and the USA, with identical products costing more for the Israeli consumer than his American or British counterpart despite his lower spending power. 17
Israeli schools have failed to deliver an education commensurate with the needs of an economy whose main resource is its populationâs intellectual capital . In the OECD âs PISA test, which is used to evaluate national education systems around the world, Israelis routinely score at the bottom of the worldâs developed economies despite their countryâs obvious successes in science and technology, such as patents per capita and global rankings of research universities . In the 2012 test, the average student in Israel scored 474 in reading literacy, math, and sciences, versus the OECD average of 497. 18 Israelâs high levels of income inequality percolate down into the schools , where lower socioeconomic status translates into some of the widest disparities in PISA math scores among OECD countries. 19 Indeed, Israeli education seems to be characterized by a reliance on the personal initiative and skills of its best students and teachers from pre-school through the universities to successfully navigate a system that is bureaucratic and inefficient, a situation anecdotally evidenced by the strong performance of the universities in global rankings even as the government has starved them of funds over the past two decades.
One measure of the extent of person...