Paper short abstract:

This on-going autoethnography of a civil protest against Bibi Netanyahu in Israel examines the outcome of emergency Covid-19 measures that forced demonstrators to remain in a 1KM radius from home. This new imposed situation pushed protesters to discover their neighbours and the everyday they share

Paper long abstract:

Thousands of protesters against Netanyahu gathered on July 14 2020, near the official PM's home in Jerusalem. By August, tens of thousands demonstrated in a very noisy and unorganized form of resistance. Netanyahu attempted to lower the heat by implementing emergency Covid-19 laws against the opinion of medical officials, imposing a total lock-down on September 25. In reaction, protesters called for 1 km demonstrations and hundreds of thousands took to the streets near their home.

My autoethnography focuses on one such location - my street in Jerusalem and the dynamics created there. I do this by contextualizing it in relation to the history of protests in Israel, which used to be grounded on the idea of an orchestrated resistance that accepted representative democracy as a norm. I also examine it in relation to various forms of collective action that characterize these 2020 demonstrations where constant action has become a goal in itself.

Theoretically, this paper challenges some assumptions that underlie everyday forms of resistance (e.g., Lefebvre and de Certeau) in investigating current politics of proximity, which transformed considerably in the past fifty years. This case demonstrates how a political order "from above" reignited the interest and conversation among neighbours who met in the streets as protesters. Rather than subverting (tactically) a given order, these local demonstrations reacted (and still do) strategically in reconceptualizing democracy by replacing a stable idea of society with a social made by constant association (Latour 2005).