Battering States: The Politics of Domestic Violence in Israel by Madelaine Adelman

Author:Madelaine Adelman [Adelman, Madelaine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: 2017-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

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A Political Economy of Domestic Violence

WHAT DOES THE COST OF COTTAGE CHEESE have to do with domestic violence? In June 2011 twenty-five-year-old Itzik Alrov from Bnei Brak posted a call on Facebook to boycott cottage cheese, a daily staple for many Israelis. He called for the boycott because a small tub of cottage cheese had recently doubled in price as a result of the state’s deregulation of the dairy market (Magnezi 2011). Indeed, the cost of dairy products had risen from 5 percent higher than OECD averages in 2005 to 51 percent higher in 2011 (Taub Center 2015, 6). Israelis, fed up with a surge in food prices and the overall increase in the cost of living, swarmed his Facebook page, which quickly attracted more than 100,000 friends. The grassroots cottage cheese boycott greatly diminished sales, pushing the near-monopoly Tnuva and smaller other domestic corporations that dominate Israel’s dairy market to lower prices on key items, and the government promised to reinstate market regulations (Sikular 2012). Cottage cheese resumed its normative place in the Israeli diet.

Within a month of the cottage cheese boycott, another twenty-five-year-old, Daphne Leef, set up a tent on the pedestrian promenade on Rothschild Boulevard in the center of Tel Aviv to protest the rapid rise in housing costs for both owners and renters (Frankel and Crystal 2011). She, too, invited the public to join her via Facebook. Tens of thousands of like-minded Israelis, some inspired by the collective power exhibited during the Arab Spring and protests in Spain and Chile, and others mobilized by NGOs and student or trade unions, joined her tent encampment along the boulevard or held encampments in their own towns and cities (Rosenhek and Shalev 2014). Hundreds of thousands participated in mass demonstrations, some of the largest in Israeli history. Under the umbrella slogan “the people demand social justice,” Israelis protested a host of concerns: lack of affordable housing, retrenchment of social services, and growth of economic inequality (Kershner 2011). In other words, young Israelis sought government relief from the rising cost of domestic life.

With protests quickly gaining in size, scope, volume, and public support—a YNET poll conducted on August 2, 2011, indicated that 85 percent of the population endorsed the protests (Grinberg 2014, 252)—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a set of housing initiatives and formed the Trajtenberg Committee. Committee members were to investigate ways to address public concerns over the structural conditions that, since the mid-1980s, had brought Israeli society to an unprecedented level of poverty, inequality, and social alienation (Trajtenberg 2012). By early September, the summer protests peaked with nearly half a million people participating in marches and rallies across the country. However, within a few days, the encampment on Rothschild Boulevard was mostly dismantled, its momentum for social justice soon muted, but not erased entirely.

So what does the cost of cottage cheese (or housing) have to do with domestic violence in Israel? In this chapter I propose an answer by exploring what I have termed “a political economy of domestic violence” (Adelman 2004a).

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