A surprise event to complement the “Arab” Spring is the nationwide turnout, starting last weekend, of at least 250,000 Israelis — over 200,000 in downtown Tel Aviv — protesting the rising cost of living in Israel and demanding government intervention to reduce food and housing prices. Set alongside the clamor for civil liberties and free and fair elections issuing from their Arab neighbors, Israeli demands may appear prosaic: a food subsidy is hardly akin to toppling a dictator. But commentators both loudly supportive of and vehemently opposed to Israel have been swift to interpret the “meaning” of these protests. Their answers invariably make a grab for the soul of Israeli nationhood.

The British left-wing blog Harry’s Place — much of whose output is concerned with defending Israel and rebutting “antisemitism” on the left — has interpreted the protests as an expression of “Zionism in the best and most traditional sense, as envisioned by the father of modern Zionism Theodor Herzl.” To underline the claimed affinity between Zionism and social democratic policy, the blogger goes on to quote Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri:

Herzl was not a socialist but he understood well that a revolutionary enterprise like Zionism could not succeed if it was to be solely based on the capitalist market model.

In his book “Altneuland,” he therefore describes the Land of Israel of the future as a social welfare society, a third way that would position itself between capitalism and socialism.

It would be a society in which natural resources – land, water, mineral wealth – are to be held by the public at large, where industry for the most part is organized through cooperatives, as is agriculture. Retail trade, however, would be in private hands. The society would provide its citizens with education and health and welfare. To staff social welfare institutions, everyone, both men and women, would be required to do two years of national service.

[…] The current demonstrations are not only a reflection of social protest. They are Zionist in the deeper sense of a just and humanistic Zionism.

This Zionist characterization of the Israeli unrest harbors a telling convenience: it precludes any commonality with protests in the wider Middle East. Never mind that one of the initial impetuses of the Egyptian protests, before regime change was openly entertained, was rising living costs and skyrocketing food prices in particular. That Israelis might be learning from their Arab neighbors is dismissed out of hand: they are merely being good Zionists, concerned that the state of Israel be true to its semi-collectivist roots (a kind of statist parallel to the demands of the Tea Party in the U.S. that America return to its “constitutional roots”). That Israel should remain a “beacon of light” in a benighted region requires a permanent ideological separation from the Arab world, which at times borders on disavowal.

For Palestinians, Israeli complaints over house prices might reasonably appear an insult, given the dispossession many Palestinians continue to endure, and the difficulties faced obtaining housing permits. Some, however, have drawn hope from the demonstrations, and have begun to make tentative claims of solidarity. Haaretz reports:

Palestinian social leaders believe the social protests that have erupted throughout Israel are largely influenced by the Arab Spring, contending Israelis must realize they too are suffering due to the occupation and money spent on settlements in the West Bank.

[…] According to the Ma’an news agency, 14,032 (nearly 75%) of the 18,722 readers who responded to their online survey, believe that what is happening in Israel’s streets is influenced by and imitating the “Arab Spring”.

“Israel is inadvertantly becoming a part of the Middle East,” said sociologist Honaida Ghanim, who researches Israeli society, adding that “this is the power of bottom-up activity, when the country’s ideologists aren’t consulted.”

That growing antipathy among Israelis towards their government will compel them to forget decades of political enmity and centuries of religious conflict in joining forces with oppressed Arabs, is as fanciful as styling the protests as a historically conscious movement for national purification in line with ancient Jewish tradition. Both sides will salvage what reassurance they can from an increasingly intransigent political stalemate, which has yet to fully absorb the shocks of the Arab Spring, and whose future has only grown more uncertain.