[P2P-F] Fwd: [NomadicUniversality2] FW: Daphni Leef's speech September 3rd 2011

Mon Sep 5 17:02:09 CEST 2011

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: George Papanikolaou <georgepapani at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Sep 5, 2011 at 9:05 PM
Subject: Fwd: [NomadicUniversality2] FW: Daphni Leef's speech September 3rd
2011
To: Michael Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>

**

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From: moshe.machover at kcl.ac.uk
To: moshe.machover at kcl.ac.uk
Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2011 07:43:24 +0100
Subject: Fwd: Daphni Leef's speech September 3rd 2011

Daphni Leef is a leader of the Israeli social protest movement. This is her
speech at the mass rally (estimated at 300,000 protestors) in Tel-Aviv.

 Daphni Leef's speech September 3rd 2011

Something massive, something huge happened this summer. Summer 2011 is the
big summer of the new Israeli hope. This hope was born, like many hopes, out
of a feeling of despair, alienation, inequalities that became impossible for
all of us, inequalities that almost became impossible to overcome.

 The Israeli society that stands here – and also, it’s important to note,
also the Israeli society that chose to stay home this evening – reached its
red line. And then it stood up and said: Enough! No more! You can cheat some
of the people some of the time, but you can’t cheat everyone all the time.
This summer we woke up and refused to keep walking with our eyes shut
towards the abyss.

  We are choosing to live. We are not invisible. If they only understand
numbers, let us remind them that there are more than 7 million people here,
and every one of these people has a heart. There was a sign on Rothschild
that said: “Every heart is a revolutionary cell.” It’s true. Every one of us
is the protest headquarters of one person.

 This summer was a wonderful obstacle course. What hurdles didn’t they put
before us? What didn’t they say about us? How they tried to break us up. The
first thing they said about us was: spoiled brats. Sushi and nargilas. From
this we learned that the automatic response of the publicly elected is to
give not respect to our actions. Their first priority was to say – it’s
nothing, zero, just a group of kids. At that point there was only the tent
camp on Rothschild Boulevard. They called us vague and deluded. The result:
tent camps began to be set up throughout the country. They had no choice but
to understand that this was something bigger, something of our own.

My generation grew up with the feeling that we were alone in the world. It’s
us versus the TV screen. That the other is our enemy, that he is our
competitor. We grew up with the feeling that we are in living in a race we
have no chance of winning, that we mustn’t rely on anyone else. They taught
us that it’s either you or him. That’s capitalism – unending competition.
The fact that this generation – the loneliest and withdrawn generation –
stood up and did something is nothing short of a miracle. The miracle of the
summer of 2011. There you have it – everything that we thought, all they
taught us – was wrong! What happened here was exactly what needed to happen.

We were closed up each of us in his own cycle, a cycle of dissatisfaction,
of a feeling of absurdity. And suddenly we began to talk, and more
importantly: We began to listen.

So they called us the extreme left. They tried to define us. How on earth do
they know who I am? How do they know who you are? Where do they get the
chutzpah? The best answer to their assertions came not from me of from my
friends, it came from the tent camps that sprang up in Hatikva neighborhood,
in Jesse Cohen, in Kiryat Gat, Kiryat Shmona, Modiin, Rahat, Kalansawa,
Jerusalem, Haifa, Bet Shean, Yerucham, and in tens of other places. All of
us, the whole country, realized that there is no right or left – we are all
servants/we all serve.

They told us – go to the periphery towns. What a terrible and condescending
thing to say. What is that – “go to the periphery”? It’s something you say
as if – there, there are no people. That there is a wasteland. Silence. And
you know what? How lucky it is that they sent us to the periphery. Because
we discovered there what we already knew – that this country is full of
beating hearts. I went there and found friends for life.

And anyway – what is that – “go to the periphery”? The State of Israel
screwed over and continues to screw over its periphery systematically and
methodically from the moment it was established. In education, health,
infrastructure, housing, welfare, culture – to say “go to the periphery” is
unprecedented hypocrisy. To talk of ‘periphery’ is to perpetuate the old
discourse that cuts out human beings, that tells them: You are put aside.
You are remote. Your needs are less important and your demands are worth
less. This summer we proved to everyone that there is no such thing as
periphery – we are all central! Every single one of us! We reduced the
physical distance between us and we found out that it’s good that way, that
we want to remain close. That they will no longer manage to distance us and
to divide us.
And then came the security escalation. But even the missiles that fell did
not ruin this protest. The opposite – they showed how strong and true it is.
The fact that we didn’t fold then was, I’ve already said this, the most
moving aspect of this protest. The time has come for the concept “Security
Situation” to stop being a value and return to being what it is – a
situation. And a situation that must change.

 Missiles fell, and we were silent for a few days. We marched in silence.
And then what did they say? They said that the protest was fading out.
Instead of recognizing that it pained us that a million Israelis were living
under the threat of missiles, that we were hurting for the people injured,
killed, and whose houses were ruined. But instead of appreciated that we
were with them, instead of seeing how our silence came from love, they said
“the protest is fading out”. They tried to turn our solidarity into retreat.

The truth is, it was sad. How on earth does the government of Israel dare to
make such an attempt of divide and rule? A government that abandoned its
residents; that abandoned its elderly, its sick, its immigrants, its weak.
How can is now come to us with such an assertion? Israeli governments have
divided us for years, and when finally we come together, when we showed that
we are not willing to carry on sitting in front of the TV, they said that we
are not showing solidarity. We don’t show solidarity? Look at what’s going
on here!

When they talk about security they come to protect human lives – how does
that line up with the Israeli government’s policy of recklessness?

I’m 25 years old. What are my biggest memories of this country: the 2nd
Lebanon War, the period of terrorism, friends who were killed then, the
assassination of Rabin, Gilad Shalit. And that’s even without going into
that I’m 3rd generation Holocaust survivor. This was my consciousness.
Moments and memories laced with death, loss, pain, fear, and the feeling
that everything is temporary.

At the demonstration in Afula I saw a sign: “For 31 days I have been proud
to be Israeli”. I stand before you and I am now proud to be an Israeli for 7
weeks. I feel we are together building here our self-worth as a society. To
say “I deserve” means that someone else also deserves, that we deserve. This
summer brought with it many good moments and memories – of hope, of change,
fraternity, listening.

 A discourse of life has been created. It’s the most important awakening
there has been here. We are not here just to survive, we are here in order
to live. We are not here just because we have nowhere else. We are here
because we want to be here. We choose to be here, we choose to be in a good
place, in a just society, we want to live in society as a society – not as a
collection of lonely individuals who each sit in front of one box, the TV,
and once every four years put a slip in another box – the polling box.

 We are here, not because we have no other land. We are here because this is
the land we want. Without our even noticing, people have begun to return
from abroad, suddenly there’s a feeling that something’s happening here that
mustn’t be missed.

 We’ve created  a new discourse here. This is the new discourse: We’ve
replaced the word pity with the word compassion. We’ve replace the word
charity with the word justice. We’ve replaced the word donation with the
word welfare. We’ve replaced the word consumer with the word citizen. We’ve
replaced the verb ‘to wait’ with the verb ‘to change’. We’ve replaced the
word alone with the word together. This is the greatest thing that we’ve
done this summer. I don’t know about you, friends, but it’s already
irreversible. We’ll not agree to go backwards! We are striding forwards, to
a better future, to a more just country. Social Justice!

We’re all of us imprisoned somehow in our social status, in our
neighborhoods, in our religion, our gender. And then I realized that we’re
not imprisoned – it’s that we’re imprisoning us! We all have an overdraft,
but the overdraft is in the interest of the banks, it’s in the interest of
the entire financial system of the state. They want to keep us constantly at
a certain level of distress. Because where there is distress there is no
hope, and where there is no hope there is no chance of change, and where
there is no chance for change there is nothing to live for. But this summer,
day after day, week after week, we went out to the streets and clarified not
just to the government, but also to ourselves, that there is something to
live for! The moment we realized this, the moment we began to think about a
shared tomorrow, we all set out to freedom!

 What will tomorrow bring? We’re all asking what tomorrow will bring. What
will happen to the tents, what is happening with the protest, where next and
what to do and all that. All this demand for the fateful day, for the
victory photo, for the decisive moment – there’s no such thing, my friends.
Was there one fateful day when the social gaps became unbearable? Did
swinish capitalism mark a particular moment of victory? Can we put our
finger on that one privatization too many? There was no such moment. There
was a process. Likewise now there is no moment – there’s a process. This
process of ours is just beginning now. We have demands of the government and
its head because things must change.
If you are a resident of Yerucham – things must change.
If you are a child whose parents have no money to pay for your school trip –
things must change.
If you are a pensioner or holocaust survivor – things must change
If you are a Gaza evacuee – things must change
If you are Bedouin – things must change.

 40% of us are defined as “financially fragile”. That means that 40% of us
can’t cope with an unexpected outlay: dental care for the kid, a burst
drain, injury. We are all living on the edge, by the skin of our teeth,
pushed to take out another loan, to need more, to save less. Our lives have
become a financial war of survival, while the state abandoned our pensions
to games on the stock market, and privatized more and more of the basic
services.

You know what’s the worst phrase? The small citizen. There are laws against
insulting a public servant, but there are no laws against insulting the
citizens. And they’ve insulted us enough over the past few years. They’ve
pushed us towards poverty, played with us, split us from each other. Don’t
know about you, but I don’t like it when they laugh at me, and I don’t like
it when they play me along.

 The citizen is not small! The citizen is the largest there is! To be a
citizen, a large citizen, and to understand this, is the greatest challenge
that stands before us. The demands of this protest are exactly based on the
understanding that we are not willing to be small citizens any more,
consumers, we are not willing to be a target audience any more, just a
sector, just a tenth. We will no longer hole up in our tiny bunkers and wage
our war of existence alone.

 That era is over.

>From now on something new: From now on we are together. We demand change,
and we demand to be part of that change.

We have begun a new discourse, a discourse of hope, of sharing, of
solidarity and responsibility. I want to ask the Prime Minister, to ask all
the politicians: Look at what happened here, at what is happening here – is
this what you want to defeat? Is this something you are able to defeat? You
are the People’s representatives. Listen to the People. This protest, that
gave so much hope to many people – do you want to break this hope? Is that
what you want? To melt down the hope? You will never succeed!

And after we jumped all the hurdles and all the spin didn’t succeed, what
did they have left? To attack me. This thing started with one person who did
something. I set up my tent on Rothschild out of a personal feeling of to be
or not to be. A person very close to my heart, Alex, put an end to his life.
He was a poet. He wrote that even if you have a heart of gold, you will not
manage to change the world. Two months before all this started up, he
couldn’t be here any longer, and he chose not to be.

How can a person like that, a dreamer and an idealist, feel that he no
longer has a place in this world? If he has no place in this world then I
suppose I have no place here either. And my heart hurt. My heart was broken.
What kind of a world is it that has no room for dreamers, idealists, poets?
What kind of world cuts them out? A world of poverty. Because all of us are
dreamers and we all have the right to dream. To be poor isn’t only not
managing to make it to the end of the financial month or to be homeless. To
be poor is to be troubled by these things, fundamentally, to such an extent
that you are not able to dream, to think, to learn, to hug your children.

So I started this thing. But just because I started it doesn’t mean it’s
mine only. It’s not just my story, it’s the story of many people who stood
up and started walking, stood up and began to do something. We all decided
to be. We decided to be here. Here we are.

This summer we learned that we all of us have a place. That tomorrow will be
what we make of it. We don’t need them to define us, we know full well who
we are. And after this summer we know that it’s okay to dream. More than
that. We understood that we must dream! To dream is to be.

7 weeks ago I was a 25 year-old who was struggling alone with her private
dreams – to make movies. In the past week I’ve been attacked from all sides,
and they almost managed to make me feel alone again. Don’t know about you,
but I’ve just started my protest…

I’ll be here as long as necessary. I want to show Alex that yes, you can
change the world, that everyone can. You only need to believe, get up, and
do something. The responsibility is on each and every one of us. To stand up
and move and talk and do and not give up.

In taking to the streets, we found home!

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