The Bubble
Small yet extremely vibrant, host to almost all the key cultural institutions and artistic scenes in the country, Tel Aviv-Jaffa is often referred to in Israel as "the bubble." Traditionally, this city on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean has become a Mecca for those seeking a non-fundamentalist lifestyle. With a nightlife that never stops, a trend-setting gay community, and flocks of young Israelis and Palestinians who cannot see themselves living anywhere else in the country, the special beat of Tel Aviv-Jaffa echoes an undertone of disbelief. A common Tel-Avivian cultural and artistic trope is to refer to the political as if it happens somewhere else. Many artistic and cultural products coming from Tel Aviv-Jaffa refer to the political as if it happens somewhere else. As if politics takes place somewhere else—in the settlements, the refugee camps, the holy sites and development towns, and not here. As if reality is not already here.
Writers and filmmakers carry this sentiment, often proposing a foretold failed journey into the political reality that is out there. A mosaic of different ethnicities, religions and sectors—Palestinians and Israelis, Muslim, Christians and Jews, religious and secular, descendants of European refugees and North African families, immigrant workers from China, the Philippines, Turkey and the former Eastern Bloc, and Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia, Bedouins and refugees from Africa—Israeli society executes its multiculturalism through hate. Liberalism in Israel is manifested in its negative sense as reversed multiculturalism: one would say that he hates the Ultra-Orthodox, and you would rightly accuse him of being anti-Semitic, but then he would add a racist comment that he also hates Palestinians Muslims and there you have an Israeli liberal. This quality is of course not alien to trends in contemporary European societies either, yet it seems that in Israel it has become the only vocabulary available. Until now. With the tent revolt we are witnessing a new and progressive mindset.
The Rothschild revolt
Seemingly without one straight street (each street curves in a elbow turn), Tel Aviv-Jaffa proposes a series of encounters "around the corner". Unlike big 19th-century cities, Paris for example, with it's perfectly aligned boulevards and balanced perspectives, where each boulevard meets another in symmetrical straight lines, in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, the streets and boulevards intertwine and break. Rothschild Boulevard, Tel Aviv's main thoroughfare, is a good example of this character—embedded in the heart of the real-estate driven and pseudo-historical "White City", Rothschild boulevard itself is home to several historical landmarks, bank headquarters, luxury apartment buildings, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, high end restaurants and galleries. With its name and its specific style, this boulevard has come to symbolize the regime of finance capital, foreign investments, privatization and big business interests.
After this boulevard has been occupied by various tasteless so called artistic project such as CowParade with decorated penguins, dolphins, cows and globes as advertisement for the 100 biggest businesses in the country, it became host to the biggest colony of tents in the country, a phenomenon that has been named by writer Ofri Ilany "The Tent Republic". For months, young Israelis established a tent republic with some forty colonies throughout the country. Beginning in Rothschild, this movement not only claims the streets and the country but it claims a new politics—one that beyond the reversed multiculturalism of hate-liberalism.
All power to the tent republics
With a government in power whose international allies are dissenting over its most fascistic policies, a government that is passing laws to investigate left-leaning civil society associations and banning the right to call for boycotting settlement produce from the occupied Palestinian territories, the republic of tents has come at a time that otherwise seemed hopeless. Yet they have come to demand a restructuring of the whole social contract—undoing the politics of hate and fear, demanding attainable housing, free education, state subsidies for the poor and higher taxes for the rich, they want a welfare state and a stop to all privatizations. The movement has discovered or even invented an Israeli civil society, which was unattainable just a month ago. The next demand is already in the horizon—putting a stop to the occupation.
Many of the tent republic's demands are inspired by the right-to-the-city movement "City for All" which took the last municipal elections in Tel Aviv-Jaffa by storm in 2008 (being the biggest party in the city council, they constitute the opposition, as the three term mayor Ron Huldai, executing the regular reversed multiculturalism politics, has made all the rest of the minority parties into one coalition). Inspired by Tahrir Square in Cairo and Puerta del Sol in Madrid, the tent republic has discovered the joy of creating a public. The de-centralized multitude of the colonies, created a self-sustaining society within the country (a kind of a village within the city—with toilets and showers, beds and other furniture). The tent, as the basic architectural unit of the new republic, is fundamental for understanding this new politics that is emerging —as much as it is temporary, everything happens outside the tent. The revolution may have started with a demand for housing, but in actuality the revolution rejects the spatial notions of in/out that an apartment suggests. The spontaneous architecture of the colonies makes a claim for the common—making things public, as Bruno Latour put it. With discussion circles followed by votes and music, the tent colony is the only place where you are not doing some kind of labour (be it affective, immaterial, communicative), claims philosopher Noam Yuran—the new republic manifests the joy of being a public.
TAZ
By now tent colonies have attracted well over half a million Israelis in weekly demonstrations and created a platform for more and more disenfranchised publics to come together—from contract workers to Israeli Arabs, from the pension-less elderly to young mothers. The irony of this movement starting in Rothschild Boulevard is of course apparent to all, and it is heightened in the way of life in the tent colony itself—private property as a category of exclusion which divides us is suspended. A communal kitchen, treatment centers, open lectures, open air screenings—the tent colonies fulfill what Hakim Bey called a temporary autonomous zone.
Unsatisfied by the bailouts they received, the austerity measures and cuts that meant to pay their debt from the public's taxes, it seems financial markets' current turmoil calls for new strategies. With the tent republic aiming higher than just bringing down the current government in Israel, a sympathetic call from Adbusters magazine and the hacker collective Anonymous are calling for a tent colony in Wall Street, organizing activists to takeover the street on September 17th.
Long live the tent republic!
Joshua Simon is a curator, journalist, filmmaker and cultural agitator based in Tel Aviv.