The tents seem to be everywhere now — Wall Street, London, Hong Kong, Madrid — but very little really comes close to what happened in Israel this summer: thousands camping out, hundreds of thousands marching, a society transformed. “It’s all part of the same thing. It’s people saying, ‘We want to be in charge,’” says Stav Shaffir, 26, one of the first Israeli campers. Says Yonatan Levi, also 26, and also an early organizer, on the comparison with the scale of things in New York City: “Sadly I think we were much more successful in transmitting our message and our ability to show up in great numbers. I mean, a half million to a million people!”
The tent protests in Tel Aviv began in muggy mid-July with a handful of young people pitching tents to protest the skyrocketing price of housing in Israel. (Tents, get it?) The first night the reporters outnumbered the protesters, but a chord had been struck. The focus quickly widened to take in a wide gamut of shared complaints about an economy that looked great at the macro level, but had created a growing gap between rich and poor. Inspired in part by the Arab Spring — “People thought, Wow, if they can do it, why can’t we do it?” says Shaffir — and in part by Madrid’s Indignants movement, the Israeli protests combined and managed the contagious spread seen in Israel’s neighbors as well as the difficult economic and social issues similar to those that emerged in Spain. Ground zero, fittingly enough, in the Tel Aviv protests was Rothschild Boulevard, a shady walkway named for a fabulously wealthy family who helped found Israel as a state originally grounded in social welfare. Within two weeks, 40 camps had sprung up around the country. Two weeks later, the camps numbered 100 and marchers 350,000, a whopping turnout in a country of just 7 million.
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