‘Occupy Israel’: A Tale of Startling Success and Hopeful Failure

In between the Arab Spring and the US Occupy movement, Israel has had its share in demonstrating the people's power against unjust authority in general and socioeconomic wrongs in particular. This paper analyzes the context, rapid growth and yet swift abatement of the Israeli protest-tent summer of 2011. I argue that the reasons for the shortly lived Israeli protest summer related more to difficulties in coping with intra-movement challenges, framing alignment and a relatively ‘closed’ political environment, and less to the omnipresent security complex and militarized political culture, which has repeatedly been suppressing other episodes in Israel's history.