Introduction

This chapter offers an insider's account and analysis of the failed efforts to democratise the Israeli Tent Protest movement and to impose accountability on its founders. Although one of the 2011 mobilisation's main banners was democratic revival and the power of collective decision-making, the attempt to implement these principles failed on the countrywide level. Behind the scenes of the lively camps, public assemblies and mass demonstrations, a fraught conflict was taking place between the movement's grassroots and its small group of founders, who had been crowned by the mainstream media as its leaders and with whom the political establishment had begun to engage. While declaring their commitment to transparency and direct democracy, the founders remained a closed group, rejecting or circumventing successive attempts to subject them to a countrywide delegate structure.

This story, despite having been arguably the most prominent topic of conversation among protest participants at the time, has received no sustained attention in scholarly discussions of the Tent Protests so far. What little literature does exist on these protests in Israel falls into three groups. The first contextualises the protests in Israel's political economy, explaining how neoliberal consolidation has created, as in other OECD countries, a precarious ‘class-generational unit’ (Rosenhek and Shalev, 2014, 43), young people of a middle-class background whose coming of age was marked by the fragmentation of old solidarities, and who now look forward to less economic security and lower standards of living than their parents’. The protests signify this cohort's break with its depoliticised, atomised and consumerist identities, while adding distinctly materialist agendas to the post-materialist ones associated with the New Social Movements (Herzog, 2013; Grinberg, 2013; Levy, 2015). The second group of writings focuses on the movement's geographical dimensions, analysing the various spatial strategies used to ‘activise’ the protests (Marom, 2013); discourses of justice among movement-allied planners (Alfasi and Fenster, 2014); the importance of protest sites’ lack of symbolic national resonance (Wallach, 2013); and the gendered and class dynamics animating the ‘peripheral’ camps in poor towns and neighbourhoods, which mobilised for a ‘protest within a protest’ (Misgav, 2013; Fenster and Misgav, 2015; Leibner, 2015). Lastly, the third group of texts criticises protesters’ political timidity and their conscious choice to present an a-political front.