The 14th of July of Daphni Leef: Class and social protest in Israel

Abstract

Most of social sciences’ research on Israel emphasizes ethnicity, status, nationality, identity, gender or coloniality as the central explanatory concepts. This article argues that in order to understand the emergence (as well as the limitations) of phenomena such as the 2011 social protest, the analysis must incorporate a class perspective. In answering questions such as which social groups initiated and supported the protest, what the socio-economic causes of the protest were and what explains the characteristic political patterns of the protest, the article proposes the following theses: (1) The protest was launched and led by the ‘bohemian-bourgeois’ sector of the middle class, but was joined by other groups; (2) The protest was the first large-scale display of class resistance to the post-Fordist, neoliberal socio-economic system; and (3) The protest manifested the emergence of a new kind of ‘post-postmodern’ politics, in response to both the representation crisis of the political system and to the failure of postmodern politics to address socio-economic concerns.