The dark enchantment of bourgeois interiority is shattered by a cobblestone through a glass window, and the camera follows the protagonists as they wake up, put on clothes and go down to join the barricades.
The year is I have protested the occupation of the West Bank, the growth of the settlements and settler violence, the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages in Firing Zone and the eviction of poor Israelis from public housing. I am used to being out on the street alone, as Israeli society continues to sleepwalk its way deeper into permanent, irreversible, de jure apartheid.
Ever since the election of a far-right populist government with sizeable fascist elements think Richard Spencer as secretary of homeland security , the act of public protest has started to become a normal part of middle-class life in Israel. We have filled city squares in the pouring rain, we have marched down wide boulevards, a thick molasses of entrepreneurs, back-end developers, baristas and gender-studies students.
And yet, something about Sunday was different. I had no plans to protest that night, and when the noise began to pour through the open window my companion asked, only half joking, if the civil war had finally started. It turned out that in a way, it had. Our phones were filled with messages and updates. In Tel Aviv, bonfires were already alight on the highway. I felt, just for a moment, what it must have been like to be swept up in one of the great bourgeois revolutions of the last two hundred years.
All around me doctors, pilots, professors, coders, waiters, teachers, accountants took a last look at their phones before going to sleep and bolted upright, lacing up shoes, slipping on coats and heading for the nearest corner, or marching all the way to the Knesset. This is what I wanted. This is what my sick, sleepwalking country needed. We returned to the Knesset the next morning, some hundred thousand of us. Most with Israeli flags, a few with Palestinian flags that the border police chased with the single-mindedness of dogs trained to hunt, but overall the mood was one of euphoria a freighted word in Hebrew, calling to mind as it does the Pyrrhic victory of the Six-Day War.
