Ein kurzer Sommer des gesellschaftlichen Wandels?

Die J14-Sozialproteste in Israel von 2011

Abstract

Between July and September 2011, Israel was swept by unprecedented social protests against escalating housing prices, rising cost of living, the yawning social inequality and the deep neo-liberalization of the last decades. What started with a couple of protest tents on the Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, became in just two weeks a mass movement. While the Israeli Social Protest has propelled an important shift in public discourse, it did however not trigger any restructuring of the neoliberal rule regime entrenched since 1985. To explain why the J14-protest was not able to destabilize the existing power relations and to push forward a post-neoliberal mode of regulation, the article analyzes both the movement’s own failures and the dynamics of cooptation and repression that silenced and pacified the social struggles – at least for the time being.