The 14th of July of Daphni Leef: The Rise and Fall of the Social Protest

The Social Protest of summer 2011 is described as an attempt to form a “new class-based coalition”—an effort by one sector of the middle class, the Tel Aviv Bobos (bourgeois bohemian), to join forces with and lead a much broader circle of the middle class, as well as lower strata throughout the country, united in opposition to the economic elite. The thesis is that for the first time since the start of the neoliberal revolution in the 1980s, the middle class stopped supporting neoliberalism and tried to get the general public to join a social coalition against the economic and financial elite. The growing economic distress of the middle class was aggravated by a sense that its republican contract with the state had been violated and that, for Netanyahu’s coalition, the favored sectors (in addition to the tycoons) are the settlers and the Ultraorthodox. Because the protest was a product of the conditions created by neoliberalism, but was also a reaction to them, it expressed a new form of postmodern politics—neither protest by an organized class nor protest by an identity group, but an attempt to create a “people” that transcends class and identity, united around the demand for social justice.