An attempt on Friday at reestablishing last summer's protest was met with a heavy hand by the police. Daphni Leef, who set up the tent that sparked last year's movement and whose call brought out hundreds on Friday, was violently detained in a sign of a shift in the protester-police dynamic.  Update: At least five ten protesters have been arrested, including Daphni Leef and Israeli actor Tomer Sharon, who had joined the protesters. The crowd stayed on, and Hadash MK Dov Khenin and Meretz MK Nitzan Horowitz arrived. Activists announced plans for a march leaving from Rothschild Boulevard at 9 p.m.…

Our subconscious need to stay within the lines, even when they aren't meant for us. By Ori Lenkinski Biking around Tel Aviv I am constantly in shock at how many pedestrians feel completely entitled to walk on the bike path. That is, on the scant bike paths the municipality of our beautiful city have deemed necessary. Most often, I notice this phenomenon on Rothschild Boulevard, where pedestrian meets biker. I wonder why the hoofers choose to walk in a place where they are barraged by the twinkly-bells of hurried bikers when there is a people lane just a few feet…

I keep asking myself why it is that I haven't pitched a tent and taken an active part in the tent encampments that are sweeping the nation.  After all I, like most of my peers, pay an exorbitant amount of rent (usually half my income), have been active in various ways on social justice issues for years, and believe civil disobedience and popular resistance are vital tools for bringing about change. So why am I not in a tent? There is no easy answer to this question and I'm still grappling with it as I write. I could provide a bunch of…

The J14 movement’s most significant achievements lie not in the political realm, but in the ways in which it has challenged and blurred commonsensical categories and distinctions involving space, time, language, and class. At the same time, one critical category remains as stable as ever By Thom 1.    This struggle is between order and disorder. This struggle is between the attempt to organize the world coherently and the challenge to this attempt, which reveals its inherent support of the social status quo. This struggle is about the power to destabilize that which is taken for granted, along with its constitutive…

A midnight walk through the Rothschild Boulevard protest camp Tel Aviv - On the corner of Allenby Street and Rothschild Boulevard, a Jewish supremacists' group is conducting fierce arguments with several bystanders. I am spotting former Kahane men, Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben Gvir, accompanied by "hilltop youth,” the radical settler teens, notorious for harassing Palestinians, who are now standing across the street from the busy pubs and food places, a bit bewildered, wearing tee-shirts saying "Tel Aviv is for Jews." Rumors are that a couple of their tents were burned by leftists. While the older kids argue, the younger…