Elhanan Fellheimer, chairman of the national student union, was grilled this week. Every protest movement needs heroes, and equally villains. The barricade needs revolution enemies around whom you can rally with harpoons.
So this week it was Fellheimer's turn for the virtual guillotine, after he announced that the association would not take part in the fight against the legal reforms.
"Every person and every student has the right to demonstrate," he emphasized the obvious - but the representative organization of the entire student body in Israel is not mobilizing for the struggle.
He does not intend to harness the mechanism and resources entrusted to him for a campaign that maybe, but really, really maybe, not all members of the student union share his goals.
Elhanan Fellheimer, photo: Eric Sultan
This was enough to make politicians, journalists and tweeters revolt against him, who did not spare compliments.
From "embarrassing" and "I doubt if the students know who it is", to "lack of backbone" and "intellectual misery".
It is always good to remember and remind what kinds of violent internal lynchings await those who do not align with the order to show up for the struggles organized by the "Democratic Permanent Party".
The walls of tolerance and pluralism crumble like brittle styrofoam every time the left discovers that there are intelligent people living among us, who were not convinced by Ehud Barak's panic arguments or, God forbid, think exactly the opposite of the informational videos of the Israel Democracy Institute.
This happens in the best democracies.
Students protesting this week, photo: E.P
where is danny
Almost all of Fellheimer's denunciations were based on the same romantic reasoning, which goes back to the historical role of the student movements in the struggles for democracy and rights.
For example, the student struggles in the US for black rights or the student revolt in France in 1968. This is, of course, an elegant way for the opponents of the reforms to flatter themselves: here their protest is in line with the great historical struggles against discrimination, colonialism and oppression. The only thing missing is a leader Students in the image of Danny the Red and then everything will be perfect, like in the films of Antonioni and Godard.
Nothing excites me more than student activism.
I dedicated my doctoral thesis to the subject.
And I would like to see the Israeli students more involved - politically, socially, culturally.
But Felheimer has a good "case": you can't force a struggle they don't identify with on all students.
Certainly not through their only representative organization.
This is certainly a claim that can be argued with - but there is no snobbery here, nor is there "intellectual misery".
There is a legitimate debate here about the mandate given to a representative union to engage in a political struggle on behalf of all its members, when the claim is relatively loosely related to student rights and interests, and in particular when the issue is in public controversy and concerns the political conscience.
Imagine if he would have dragged the association into the fight against the disengagement plan?
The student revolt in '68 in France, photo: E.P
The student revolt in France 1968, photo: E.P
And there is also a matter of local political tradition and proportions, and above all: nothing prevents the student cells and activists from organizing and leading demonstrations and joining the struggle separately from the national organization.
So the student union as a body - did not go out into the struggle.
But quite a few groups of students - yes.
Demonstrations were held in several universities, lecturers spoke, deans and professors gave speeches.
And this already caused most satisfaction: politicians and commentators rejoiced that "the young are not silent", and law professors were proud of their students.
Here is Danny!
But seeing the protests here, the thought creeps in that if radicals from the '68 generation had visited one of the demonstrations on campus, they would have gone crazy: they used to greet rectors with a barrage of eggs;
The Israeli students welcome them with applause and whistles of encouragement.
Dani Ha'Adom and the members of the anarchist cell at the University of Nanterre started a rebellion, first of all, against the university establishment, against their mentors, against the elite connection between the senior professorship and the governmental and legal establishment, and against the existing social and cultural order - while the Israeli students, who are supposedly setting out to "defend democracy" with the encouragement of their mentors, defend with their bodies Hegemony, they worship those in authority and dream of preserving the existing hierarchy at all costs.
Students at Ben Gurion University protest against the reform, photo: Dodo Greenspan
I would be excited, for example, if law students dared to defy the existing legal establishment in which they strive to integrate: how the student conscience does not arise from the distorted demographic composition of the Supreme Court, and where is the concern for equal representation in a center of power monolithically controlled by a socio-economic and ethnic stratum that holds With a distinct class advantage?
How do they and their lecturers remain level-headed in the face of a discriminatory law enforcement system, which if you fall into its jaws by mistake and you have no money or connections - the chances of you getting out of it with justice are slim?
How come the terrible interrogation methods, which have been exposed time and time again in the past year, do not generate the page of a protest?
Demonstrators at the Hebrew University with PLO flags. Elite trainees, photo: Yonatan Zindel/Flash90
The answer is that they and their lecturers are much less activists than they think.
They are not similar to the Red Danes, but to the generation that the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called "the heirs", that is, the apprentices of the elites who acquire in the faculties the tools that will enable them to inherit the previous generation and preserve the existing social order.
Social reproduction in the classroom.
And the truth is that it disturbs peace to see how the students of the students of the fathers of the constitutional revolution were brought up to mobilize as a bodyguard whenever an external force threatens the fortress whose high windows they shine their eyes on, and how absent they are of any instinct for critical and confrontational thinking - against the conservative, frozen and degenerate establishment, which they are about to network.
And their leaders still dare to make claims to the only student who is not impressed by the aristocratic and decadent show of conservatism of the heirs to the mantle and estates.
The opposite of them is Elhanan the Red.
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