“Yesh Atid was elected to the Knesset on the back of the social protest and it looks like they are also going to re-ignite it. … If the Treasury presents an anti-social budget proposal [for 2015], it will find that Operation Protective Edge is not the last operation with which it is confronted. 'A social Protective Edge' will be placed at its doorstep.”

Knesset member Eli Yishai of the Shas Party posted this gloomy forecast Aug. 31 on his Facebook page, following the government’s decision on an across-the-board budget cut of 1.9 billion Israeli shekels ($542 million), including the education and health budgets, to fund Operation Protective Edge. This is, of course, a confrontational and disparaging statement by Yishai against his political rival, Finance Minister Yair Lapid, who left Yishai and his other Shas friends out of government. But there’s a grain of truth even in such political bickering. In this case, Yishai scored a direct hit on Lapid’s soft underbelly, given that Lapid was catapulted into the Finance Ministry on the back of the social protest that erupted in the summer of 2011.

It would be a serious mistake to declare the social agenda and the protest spirit dead in the face of the broad-based budget cuts and the prime minister’s unequivocal support for the new defense budget demands. True, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon is conducting an effective campaign for a budget increase to pay for Operation Protective Edge and the threats from the north, to the enormous tune of 20 billion Israeli shekels ($5.7 billion), but his demands are being met by a combative and well-prepared opposition.

It’s not just the expected criticism on the part of political rivals, but mostly a new discourse that has become entrenched in the Israeli public since the social protest. This discourse is also being led by social agenda organizations, journalists and even social networks, which have become a sort of tie-breaking weapon in the struggle over a social agenda. This is a kind of reversal of consciousness that started three years ago and keeps spreading and putting down roots.