NOVANEWS
The protests could go in any number of directions: they could peter out as the disaffected lower- and middle-class organizers and participants return home, chastened, bored, and tired. They could extract some victories from the government in the form of a redirection of spending from warfare to welfare. The left could also come in from its long winter of isolation and quiescence, rejoining the social consensus in its historical role as an insistent nag, complaining about the occupation yet doing nothing about it.
Or they could draw the connections between Israel’s stratospheric subsidies for high-tech investment, the privatization of the state-owned industrial plant, the gutting of the social compact, the non-stop militarization, the constant wars, the rockets falling on southern and northern Israel from the Palestinians the Israeli military complex profits from persecuting, oppressing, murdering, and immiserating. Doing so would mean confronting the Israeli lower classes with a clear political choices, and faced with such a choice, they are as likely to opt for xenophobic reaction, to descend into a right-wing riotous rabble, as to move to revolution.
The quandary of the upper class, somewhat ambivalent about the occupation yet wholly committed to neo-liberalism, is more convoluted. What it will fight at all costs is an end to Israeli economic inequities, because it is off those inequities that it gets fat. For that reason, any re-orientation of spending from militarism to housing will lay a foundation for further victories.
Perhaps more important than structural victories would be the effect of such victories on the Israeli consciousness, and for that reason the Israeli government will pay any price to divert, disrupt, or diffuse these protests if the pressure they create becomes too great to ignore, because such victories would offer a dangerous lesson to the human beings who make up the gears and pulleys and levers, all the whirring machinery of the apartheid system: that occupation and racism are not just a means of social control over a reeling and shattered Palestinian society, but over the Israeli lower classes themselves.
Full article at MRZine
