The protesters do not want peace. In fact, one of the common posters in Rothschild imitates the very font, color, and design of “Peace Now” and replaces it with “Welfare State Now.” This is what makes Israelis take to the street: the exorbitant cost of living in Israel. With average wages considerably lower than in Europe or North America, prices in Israel are often much higher.
Obviously, life in Israel is economically much better than in neighboring countries. Why do Israelis expect more? Why do they compare themselves to Europe and North America, not to Egypt or Turkey? Because that’s what the Israeli state (all Israeli governments from the mid-1980s on have had precisely the same policy) has persuaded us to do. The Israeli ruling right wing (call it Labor, Likud, or Kadima; they’re all the same) has persuaded Israel’s middle class that peace is unnecessary: we can both run the occupation and have a Western standard of living. As evidence, they point at Israel’s membership in the OECD, the exclusive club of the world’s richest economies, or at Israel’s prosperous high-tech industry.
The idea sounds perfect: the regime knows that the Israeli middle class would refuse to pay for the occupation. The regime is unwilling to give up the occupation, so it convinces the masses that the occupation has no economic price for them. We don’t need peace: we can go on like this and have a good life. (Convincing Israelis that the other side does not want peace is another component of the same ideology.)
But to keep this lie alive, they have to deliver. And the Israeli governments cannot deliver. The middle class hears the promises of the good life and reads reports on diminishing unemployment rates and strong growth, but it sees a different reality: it gets poorer all the time. I see it all around me: hard-working parents cannot raise their children — let alone buy a flat — without massive aid from their own parents. “Grandparents are not an ATM,” as some protesters write on their posters.
Aims and Distractions
The rage of the protesters is not aimed especially at the occupation. Some of the protesters are blind to the occupation’s economic significance; some of them fear a split in the protest if this becomes the focus. Indeed, the occupation is in my eyes Israel’s greatest sin, but not its only one. The protesters implicitly target the unfulfilled promises of the good life. They target regressive taxation, and they target the few Israeli tycoons who, because of the interdependence between politics and big money, have monopolized almost every branch of the small, isolated Israeli economy and turned the entire people into their captive market.
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