HaTikva encampment, 2011: The ambiguous agency of the marginalized

Under the legitimacy of the wave of social protest initiated by middle-class Israeli students in July 2011, a much broader movement developed as thousands of marginalized poor hoping to obtain housing solutions began encamping in public spaces. These Israeli poor, mainly of Mizrahi origin, did not fit the model of “the salt of the earth,” the “good citizens” who by virtue of their contribution to the colonization project are supposed to enjoy preferred treatment by the state. Based on a reflexive analysis of my political intervention, in this paper I describe the dynamics of the HaTikva encampment of the poor in south Tel Aviv. Making use of the contradictions between the state’s colonialist logic and its neoliberal reforms, a marginalized and poor segment of Mizrahi Jews was able, for a short while, to act as an autonomous political agent and shed the control and patronage of political bosses. The very same marginality that allowed them to develop significant agency and even to experiment with alliances with Arab Palestinian protesters in opposition to both hegemony and dominant sociopolitical structures explains the rapid decline of their protest and its failure to obtain housing solutions and policy change.