Anyone still struggling to understand exactly what happened last summer − when tent cities made up of Israelis demanding “social justice” spread across the country’s cities and towns, and who wants to know just who constituted the core of the protesters and what they hoped to achieve, is welcome to read a new book by someone who − for a few moments at least − became one of the demonstrators’ most admired guides: Yaron Zelekha. Reading it will help one to understand that, much like Zelekha, this core group was not looking to replace the existing economic system, but rather to correct the faults they believe pervade the one now in place.
The protest was led not by desperate people, but by believers who, out of their faith in the system, asked it to make good on its promissory notes. And so, despite the important and moving gestures to Charlie Biton and his friends, it was not the descendants of the Israeli Black Panthers who filled the city squares, but, paradoxically, their historical opponents: supporters of the mainstream Zionist parties, of blessed memory.
Like these protesters (and perhaps this accounts for their mutual enthusiasm), Zelekha, a former accountant general of the Finance Ministry, seeks adjustment and not change. Like them, he too avoids everything that smells of politics or ideology. For this reason, he declares in his book that he offers “a modern social-welfare doctrine for the Israeli economy, not because of social or political ideology, but with the intention of achieving efficiency and fiscal welfare.” It may be that he too, like some of the protesters, believes that this is even possible. Bless them all.
I approached the book with some trepidation. My concern had several sources. First, collaborating, as a reader, with a commercial product that promises to be a guide to “a new socioeconomic agenda for Israel” yet has a bar code and a recommended price of NIS 88, seemed illegitimate to me: another victory for the capitalist system, in which everything, even a protest as important as the one last summer, is considered a product.
The real questions are: What is the final price of that product and who will benefit the most from it?
Second, on the back cover, we are told that the author “doesn’t want to cry over spilled milk or lament the last 40 years,” and I’m disturbed by the implication that this indicates a Protestant ethic that views suffering as ordained by God, and about which it’s better not to think too much. I believe that not only is it important to cry over every drop of spilled milk (mainly because so many of the thirsty don’t have any, and it is only right to acknowledge the pain of their thirst, even if only retroactively), but that it is also vital to know who dared to take from the small milk jug we shared so they can enjoy expensive cream on their tables. No less important is to find out what happened to those who were supposed to be guarding the jug, mainly to avoid similar looting in the future.
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