Bethel Finance: The corporate responsibility challenge in Israel

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The Israeli organisation, Maala, has cancelled its annual CSR conference as a result of huge demonstrations calling for social justice. Here CEO Momo Mahadav explains how business can rise to the challenge.

Over the past four months, Israel has seen the rise of the largest movement for social and economic change in the country's history.

In a spontaneous outburst that predated the Occupy movements, but followed closely on the heels of the Spanish indignados and the Arab Spring revolutions, Israelis took to the streets this summer en masse calling for a new social compact, based on greater social justice.

At its peak, the movement brought half a million demonstrators out into the streets – a staggering feat in a country of less than 8 million people – while opinion polls revealed over 90% support for its goals among the general public.

Few saw it coming. Israel's economic indicators were, and continue to be, strong. Unemployment is low compared with the West, and Israel has largely ducked the chaos associated with the global economic crisis.

Yet, dissatisfaction was simmering just below the surface. Just a month before the protest movement exploded onto the scene, Israel saw its first ever successful consumer boycott, a Facebook-based campaign to lower the price of cottage cheese, a staple good.

Like Occupy, Israel's protest movement conveyed complex, often unclear, messages. While most of its energy was directed at the government, a measure of popular fury was also directed at the business community, particularly the large corporations.

Despite this, many in the business world initially identified with the protest's message of social justice and equity. However, as the national leadership vacuum deepened, the protest increasingly began to target specific companies with boycotts and demonstrations, inflaming public sentiment against Israeli corporations.

All of this led us to ask ourselves what the role of the CSR community was in this new reality, at a time when the old rules no longer applied? After working with business to promote CSR in Israel for the last decade, we wondered: had we failed, or was this perhaps a rare opportunity for real change?

We began conducting a series of conversations with CEOs. Many of them expressed sympathy for the goals of the protest movement, alongside disappointment over a lack of political leadership, but few could point out ways in which their organisations could be doing things differently.

Meanwhile, our annual CSR conference, which typically draws an influential crowd of business leaders, international guests and media totaling more than one thousand delegates, was drawing near. As the date approached, we realised that the protest's calls for change had yet to find expression in the CSR agenda.

We also realised something else: that if this crisis were to be turned into an opportunity for real and lasting change, that change would have to come from within. Companies would have to look inward, putting into motion processes of change within their organisations. What was needed was introspection, not outward communication.

When we realised that, the decision to cancel the conference, which was planned for 21 November, was easy. Now our challenge is to reboot our efforts, devoting our full attention to helping Israeli business find ways to translate this social ferment into concrete change.

How? Initially, we plan to concentrate on two fundamental areas.

First, through a new focus on "fairness" in business. In a fascinating conversation we had with a group of students a couple of months before the protest, we realised that this word holds the key to understanding our mission. While the students had plenty of praise for CSR, they genuinely felt that, as customers and stakeholders, they were still not being treated fairly by companies. If that is the case, we realised, then none of our efforts to promote CSR really matter. Thus, integrating the concept of fairness into business will be at the root of our work over the coming months.

Second, empowerment of CSR and sustainability managers. Too often, we've let ourselves settle into a groove where the practice of CSR boils down to checklists. Living up to a new set of expectations will require a renewed spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship among CSR and sustainability managers, whose job it is to push bottom-up initiatives that challenge senior management.

The summer of 2011 was a tipping point, and a wake-up call for the Israeli (and global) business and CSR communities. Things have changed, fundamentally, and it seems that this is not just a passing trend. Over the next year or so, this will be our mission. We hope that we'll have something to show for it in our next conference, in 2012.