Next to side-by-side black-and-white portraits of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall hanging on a wall in Daphna Ziman’s living room, the Israeli law professor Daphne Barak-Erez addressed the significance of recent social protests in Israel.
Organized by the newly formed Women’s Empowerment Foundation and co-sponsored by the Israeli Leadership Council and Friends of Tel Aviv University, a small group of 50 cozied up in lush lounge chairs to hear about the dwindling power of the Israeli middle class.
“In one sense, what happened in Israel is not that different from what’s been happening all over the world,” said Barak-Erez, who has held visiting professorships at Stanford, Duke and Columbia. But while certain elements of Israel’s unrest — middle-class concerns over affordable housing, access to health care and public education — are shared with the citizen-led protest movements that have swept the Middle East, the phenomenon in Israel is not about overthrowing tyrants but instead is a plea from ordinary citizens to have more say in their government, closer to the ongoing Occupy Wall Street movement taking place in cities throughout the United States.
“The strength of Israeli society, for decades, used to be the fact that people could count on a certain social cohesion,” Barak-Erez said. Since Israel’s founding, social institutions were foundational in the fabric of Israeli society, and most citizens felt they could rely on government-subsidized institutions for education and health care. Public trust in the government to support these basic needs led to a certain social stability in public life. But, Barak-Erez said, many of the public institutions Israeli society depends upon are being eroded in a national shift toward a more capitalist system.
“People feel insecure about education, housing, health care,” she said, adding that stability in those areas is crucial for enabling Israelis to grapple with the larger issues they face — the Palestinian issue, a nuclear Iran and the secular/religious clash that comprises much of public discourse. Barak-Erez warned that the protests are less a reaction to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government than a long-stewing historical trend that has valued economic aspiration and privatization of resources over the Labor Zionist socialist strains the country was founded upon.
“Citizens are now expected to pay for services once provided by the government,” Barak-Erez said. She talked about what she termed “privatization by omission,” when the government doesn’t provide enough quality services to its citizens and, to compensate, creates incentives for private players to get involved. “I’m not saying private services are necessarily wrong,” she said, “but all of this is occurring without having broad public discourse about where we want to go.” Barak-Erez said that the incremental changes that comprised this fundamental shift “went under the radar of the legal system.”
Is it too late for social change? When, like the United States, most of the country’s wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, how do street movements have any hope for influencing the power structure? “The legal system has just woken from a long sleep,” Barak-Erez said.
Barak-Erez is dean of Tel Aviv University’s law school, the Buchmann Faculty of Law, and said she hopes to establish a center for law and society in the coming year that will investigate the “burning issues” of Israeli society and develop policies and enforcement initiatives that will incorporate citizen concerns into the Israeli legal system.
“I don’t want instant solutions,” she said, opening lively debate that extended through the hour. “I want these issues to be internalized into public discourse in Israel.”
As one attendee pointed out, research is important, but what about holding the government accountable for getting things done? “Nothing will happen without political will,” Barak-Erez admitted. “But I am hopeful. I have to be hopeful.”
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