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ON A BROILING FRIDAY afternoon in late June, police dragged Daphne Leef kicking and screaming from Tel Aviv's Rothschild Boulevard, leaving the 26-year-old initiator of last summer's mass social protest with multiple bruises and a broken left arm.
Almost a year earlier, Leef had pitched a tent in the tree-lined central thoroughfare in protest at the lack of affordable housing in the city. Within hours, dozens of tents sprung up in solidarity, sparking a nationwide call for social justice in which hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets.
This year, however, the city adamantly refused to issue permits for protest tents on the leafy boulevard. Leef's temporary dwelling was quickly folded up and removed by city inspectors, while police arrested her and 11 other would-be protesters for disturbing the peace.
The police action triggered some of the worst protest violence in the city's history.On the Saturday night following Leef's arrest, police waded into marching demonstrators, some of whom threw eggs, overturned trash cans and smashed bank windows. Gone was last year's good-humored summer camp atmosphere. A plethora of cell phone videos and photographs showed police shoving, beating and even choking protesters, many of them young women. And with over 80 bloodied and bruised demonstrators arrested, this year's protests threatened to turn even uglier.
Orders from above
Protest leaders accused the police of acting on orders from above to smash the popular movement. Police retorted that because no one was taking much notice of them this year, protesters had turned to violent provocation to grab attention.
After the Saturday night clashes, both sides pulled back, realizing that continued violence would be detrimental to their respective causes. Protests the following weekends passed by relatively quietly. But the uneasy truce left a number of unanswered questions.
Was the police violence directed from above in a premeditated attempt by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to crush the protest movement? What role is being played by Tel Aviv's mayor Ron Huldai, nominally a member of the opposition Labor party? Is there a hard core of radical protesters pushing for violence? What direction is the rest of this summer's protest likely to take? And what are its chances of success?
The stakes could not be higher....