Gershom Gorenberg

Gershom Gorenberg

Five minutes after I read a fresh online item about the Knesset passing the National Planning Committees Act (popularly known as the Vandal Act, based on a word play that defies resistance), I stepped out my front door and found an advertising flier, very glossy, hanging from the doorknob. The timing could not have been appropriate.

The note on my door advertised the grand opening of a luxury full-service apartment development for tourists in Baka, the neighborhood next to mine in Jerusalem. Real estate that could have been used for affordable housing for young families will instead generate high profits through rental to wealthy tourists. In the off-season, the building is likely to be mostly empty. The cost to the developers has already been figured into the rent; the social cost to the neighborhood will be paid by the neighbors.

The Vandal Act (Hebrew text of the bill as it left committee here) provides for establishment of one national and six district committees to approve housing plans under an accelerated process. Benjamin Netanyahu – the man with three homes – claims that the bill will get dread government bureaucracy out of the way and speed construction of new homes. But those bureaucratic barriers that Bibi so despises include the process of opening a plan to public discussion and objections on social and environmental grounds. A much more realistic analysis of the law by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Bimkom – Planners for Planning rights, and the Association for Distributive Justice, states that establishing the committees

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Gershom Gorenberg

This afternoon the leaders of the tent-city protest movement held a press conference to reiterate their demands. If you know Hebrew, you can watch it in the video here. If you don’t, a slightly abridged translation follows.

In the margins of these demands, I’d make several notes. First, just as Stav Shaffir says of the demands of the striking doctors, this list doesn’t go far enough. It doesn’t include immediate repeal of the tax cuts for the rich that Bibi Netanyahu instituted in 2003 and extended last year, and that leave the state without the cash it needs to meet basic social responsibilities. It doesn’t include a regulatory offensive against the cartels, an end to any further sell-off of public assets, or an immediate end to settlement funding. Nu, it’s still a good start.

What’s particularly good is the basic principle stated by Shaffir:

The state must be responsible for the well-being of the citizens. This is not the job of non-profits and voluntary organizations.

The free-marketeers have assiduously attacked this idea for years, but it is basic to Israel’s founding principles and seems to have risen out of collective memory, still alive and powerful.

Also worthy of note is the demand for free education from birth. Implied in that is not only that the steady evasion of state responsibility for schools must end, but also the idea that pre-school is more than a place to warehouse children.

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Gershom Gorenberg

The dead have come to life.

I saw them marching tonight through Jerusalem, jumping, swaying, pounding pots and water-cooler bottles as drums, the Israelis in their twenties who’d been written off in a thousand political obituaries as dead of terminal apathy, sweating in the absurd heat close to midnight, roaring so deep you could hear their throats tearing in anger and in joy at being angry together and being alive again.

They came flooding down from Zion Square through Independence Park and up Agron Street to the square outside of one of Netanyahu’s three homes, and they sang an old kindergarten song about “my hat has three corners” rewritten as “my Bibi owns three houses,” and they overflowed up onto the walls and fences past the sidewalks and they danced with mad happiness at seeing each other.

They chanted “The people want social justice!” and “What’s the answer to privatization? Re-Vo-Lu-Tion!” and waved flags, both blue-and-white and red. They cheered for the Arab medical student telling the government it has to pay for health care, and for the teacher decrying the pure insult of treating teachers as temp workers, and for the rabbi quoting Isaiah.

Rock singer Kobi Oz got on the stage with his guitar and roared into the mike the blessing praising God “Who has kept us alive to this moment!” Someone had a sign saying, “I’d burn a tire, but I can’t afford one.” An eight-month pregnant woman leaned back against her partner for support. A dark-eyed woman climbed onto a man’s shoulders and danced to the chants. A little girl held up a sign saying, “People before profits.” The crowd chanted, time and again, “Revolution!”

There were over 10,000 people in Jerusalem, but that was only the local Jerusalem crowd, because the marches took place in 11 cities, Jewish and Arab. Local news reports list said the national total hit 150,000. For those reading this from abroad, I note that this number is equivalent to six million people marching in America.

For those reading from abroad, I also note that so far, foreign editors have completely missed what’s happening here, because the stories they expect from Israel are about war and terror and peace talks, so they haven’t gotten their minds around two weeks of protests that just keep getting bigger, Israelis inspired by Egypt, demanding what was once the basic minimum here before the poison of privatization arrived: free education, free health care, affordable apartments.

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column on the economic protests sweeping Israel is now up at The American Prospect:

“Even Adam Smith is turning over in his grave,” reads a handwritten sign pinned to one of the small, square tents. Next to the sign, sewn to the tent, is a piece of cloth with the address printed on it: “51 Tent Boulevard.”

On maps of Tel Aviv, the street is listed as Rothschild Boulevard, but over the past two weeks, the new name has become more appropriate. On the wide, tree-shaded center island, hundreds of nearly identical tents have been pitched in neat rows: a city of protest against the robber-baron economic policies of Israel’s current and recent governments, particularly a drastic housing shortage that is hurting not only the poor but the daughters and sons of the country’s middle class.

At the north end of the boulevard, facing Israel’s Habima national theater, a cloth awning hangs over the tables that serve as the protest headquarters, with an Israeli flag standing on either side—as if the ranks of gray tents were about to march northward, toward the wealthy end of the city and the flush suburbs beyond. Under the awning, a thin 29-year-old man with a three-day beard tells me that he gave up plans to get married for lack of cash. “They stole our dreams,” he says. “A person is built of dreams.” A large hand-painted sign nearby renames the intersection “Habima-Tahrir Square.”

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

This article is against the law. To be more precise: It includes a call for boycotting the products of West Bank settlements, a call that will be illegal in Israel as soon as legislation just approved by the Knesset is published in the official gazette and takes effect. That’s normally a matter of a couple of days, perhaps a week.

The Prohibition on Instituting a Boycott Act was submitted by Zeev Elkin—a West Bank settler and Likud politician who chairs the ruling coalition in Israel’s parliament. On Monday night, the Knesset passed the Boycott Act on a straight party-line vote, with the 47 members of the coalition and a far-right opposition party voting in favor, and the 38 members of center and left-wing opposition parties voting against.

Under the law, publicly calling for an “economic, academic or cultural” boycott of “the State of Israel, one of its institutions or an area under its control” is a “civil tort.” That is, publicly organizing or even supporting a boycott is grounds for the boycott’s target to file a civil suit, and for a court to award punitive damages even if the plaintiff doesn’t prove actual financial harm. Promoting a boycott isn’t a criminal act, but it’s definitely an illegal one, and the Knesset has made civil lawsuits the method of punishment. (My thanks to leading Israeli legal commentator Moshe Negbi and to Georgetown University law professor David Luban for parsing the law.)

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Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect.

The plan is to comb the floor of the Mediterranean for the remains of the ship. The Israeli government will reportedly allocate $60,000 for the search. The next stage, much more costly, will be to salvage the Altalena and turn it into a memorial for the men of the right-wing Irgun underground, which sparked the momentary Israeli civil war in June 1948.