The social protests that rocked Israel in the summer of 2011 were one of the worst nightmares that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had in all his years in office. Now it looks like the protests are back and possibly bigger than ever.

The earlier protests began with a single tent set up on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv after the country managed to get through the global economic crisis that began in 2008 with minimal damage. Nevertheless, the protesters, mostly from the middle class, were unwilling to accept the preferential treatment that they believed a small group of “tycoons” had received from the government. They were angry that these individuals had grown rich through privatization and upset at the government’s failure to rein in the monopolies they had created, which had made Israel one of the most expensive countries to live in.

The protests emerged as part of the global phenomenon that included Occupy Wall Street in the United States. The founding of the centrist Yesh Atid was one of the political byproducts of the movement. Although the party spent two years in a Netanyahu coalition, in 2015 it became the most vociferous opponent of his governments. A tent protest reappeared April 25, again on Rothschild Boulevard, with the protester’s main gripe being their economic abandonment by the government.

Before Covid-19 began ravaging the global economy, Israel’s economic situation was considered good by international economic standards: unemployment was low, at 4-5%; the average wage had been rising steadily; the gap between rich and poor was shrinking; and credit was relatively cheap. Then the coronavirus reshuffled the deck. Within a month, the unemployment rate shot up to 27%, with 1,125,000 people out of work. The majority of the newly unemployed are actually salaried employees on unpaid leave, meaning that many of them could return to work once the crisis passes. On the other hand, the crisis means that they have no source of income apart from unemployment payments, which are no more than 70% of their regular salaries.