Israeli’s Act of Despair Disheartens a Movement

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/17/world/middleeast/israel-protesters-somber-after-self-immolation.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120717


July 16, 2012

Israeli’s Act of Despair Disheartens a Movement

By ISABEL KERSHNER

TEL AVIV — As doctors struggled on Monday to save the life of Moshe Silman, an Israeli man who set himself on fire at a protest for social justice in this Mediterranean city two days earlier, a grim mood had already replaced the mostly blithe atmosphere that characterized Israel’s popular movement for social change last summer.

While activists said Mr. Silman’s desperate act reaffirmed the relevancy of a grass-roots struggle that had seemed to be floundering, they appeared traumatized as they searched for an appropriate response.

“We must never encourage such a thing,” Stav Shaffir, a prominent leader of the movement, said in a telephone interview. “On the other hand, it cannot be ignored. Moshe Silman cried the cry of a lot of people.”

At the peak of last summer’s rallies, at least 400,000 Israelis peacefully took to the streets in this city and others, in one of the largest protests in the nation’s history. In the past few weeks, though, efforts to revive those heady days have been met with a degree of public apathy.



Then on Saturday, thousands of demonstrators turned out to mark the anniversary of the start of last year’s protests, dividing up into clusters and gathering around small stages. One by one the protesters voiced a wide range of complaints, from limited resources for school psychologists to the lack of public housing for disadvantaged Russian-speaking immigrants. A few people danced nearby to a song by an Israeli rap group that boomed from large speakers.



Suddenly, a tower of flames shot up near one of the podiums.



Mr. Silman, in his 50s, a fixture at the street protests over the past year, came to Tel Aviv on Saturday night equipped with gasoline and a suicide note. He had once run his own truck delivery business, but he had gotten into debt and then suffered a stroke.



In a typed letter he had copied and distributed in advance, he complained that his pleas for help had been rejected by the courts, the Housing Ministry and the National Insurance Institute, and that he was about to become homeless.



“The state of Israel stole from me and robbed me,” he wrote. “They left me with nothing.”



He added, “And I will not be homeless and this is why I protest.”



Mr. Silman’s story of bureaucratic torment and the shortcomings of a system that failed him has dominated the news in Israel ever since.



But so far his case has not given the movement a new start; it has only added to the anger and gloom. The ad hoc group of young leaders who were the faces of the movement has splintered off in different directions. And the authorities made it clear there would be no repeat of last year’s scene of a huge tent encampment that sprang up along the grassy median of Rothschild Boulevard, one of Tel Aviv’s most elegant avenues.



What started then as a Facebook-driven protest over housing prices grew into a largely middle-class revolt against the rising cost of living.



When Daphni Leef, the initiator of the protest, and fellow activists returned with their tents in a symbolic act three weeks ago, police officers aggressively broke up the demonstration and forcefully arrested Ms. Leef and a dozen others. The next night, demonstrators came out to protest police violence and the arrests. There was another aggressive police response, some bank windows were smashed by protesters, and 89 more people were arrested.



The news media in Israel have largely turned against the activists. Rather than rallying the public to join the protests, as they did last year, recent articles have focused on the amount and sources of their financing.



Interviewed in a Tel Aviv cafe days before Mr. Silman’s self-immolation, Ms. Shaffir, 27, a leader of the protest movement, said some editors warned the activists in the winter that the news coverage would no longer be sympathetic because the support they gave the protests last summer had scared off advertisers.



Over the year, the government has responded to the protests by appointing a committee on socioeconomic change led by Manuel Trajtenberg, a respected professor of economics, and backing some of its recommendations. They include the rapid construction of apartments over the next few years, the availability of more apartments for rent, free education for children starting at age 3, instead of 5, and the construction of more day care centers.



But Ms. Shaffir and others say they are looking for more fundamental change, what amounts to a new kind of politics.



“We want to change the way resources are distributed,” Ms. Shaffir said, “to change the order of priorities, to recreate social mobility and narrow socioeconomic gaps and to provide more basic public services.”



Ms. Shaffir, who has set up a nonprofit organization with several protest leaders to promote these goals, is still contemplating whether to continue working outside the system or to join a political party.



“We all miss last summer,” she said. “It was amazing. But it is time to mature and move on.”



Ms. Leef, who rejects the idea of working within the political system, has set up her own nonprofit organization dedicated to the empowerment of Israel’s citizens.



“I do not feel that we live in a democracy,” she said. “I feel we live in an oligarchy. A few wealthy families control this country.”



Itzik Shmuli, the leader of the national student union, has moved to Lod, a poor and ramshackle city outside Tel Aviv, and he is trying to raise money from the business sector for the community.



Other leaders of last summer’s protests have opened a cooperative bar and vegan restaurant in the shabby-chic Florentine quarter of Tel Aviv. The bar’s name, called Bar Kaima, is a play on the Hebrew phrase for “durable” or “viable.”



“We are peaceful anarchists,” said Ofir Avigad, 25, one of the founding members, soon after the bar opened last week. “It’s about how we can teach ourselves to govern ourselves.”



“And we have humor,” he added. “People have a limit to how much ideology they want with their beer.”



But after Mr. Silman’s tragic protest, it seemed unlikely that the social justice movement would continue to be a source of cheer.



Dina Kraft contributed reporting.



© 2011 The New York Times Company



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"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs