Tel-Aviv

After the Arab spring, the Israeli summer. Granted, a milder social revolution by a factor of about one million. But a revolution nonetheless. Israelis are falling out of love with the particular brand of winner-takes-all capitalism that has swept over the country during the past quarter-century. High-tech Israel has boomed but where once there was an Israeli-flavored socialism holding things together, now it is every man for himself. And too many Israelis, especially the young, are finding themselves priced out of the market. Tel-Aviv in particular has become impossibly expensive, with rents going through the roof. Hence the sudden appearance of Tent City on one of the poshest streets, as protesters stage an open-ended lie-in.

I spent much time in Tel-Aviv during the last decade and almost moved there permanently in 2004. It would have been perfect timing for a property investment but I had other, less hard-nosed considerations affecting my judgement. As I returned on subsequent visits I was shocked by the rapidity of the city's transformation from a low-rise town full of old-school charm and quirkiness into a thrusting, high-rise yuppie utopia, a wannabe New York. Overnight, sushi replaced felafel as the favourite snack, while slick apartment blocks, restaurant chains, modern art galleries and wine shops elbowed out the more ramshackle and idiosyncratic former occupants of central Tel-Aviv. Prices for everything rocketed and the number of street beggars multiplied.

Of course it's easy to fall into the trap of nostalgia. Tel-Aviv in the late 90s and early Noughties had been defaced by dreadful terrorism. It was the relative lack of this which helped pave the way for the city's unprecedented economic boom. In addition, globalisation and the blossoming of Israel's technological and entrepreneurial talents (see "Start-up Nation") combined to put the country in an economic sweet spot.

But having lived through the UK's material decade of the 1980s and the leisure and lifestyle boom of the 90s, during which time bland corporate sameness began to dominate, I couldn't help but cast a rather jaundiced eye on the new, booming Tel-Aviv. The city was losing it's innocence and becoming just another cynic, whose wheeler-dealer speculators knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. In that respect the "Bubble" was simply a more intense microcosm of this newly capitalistic country.

Of course the past can never be revisited. Tel-Aviv has moved on but what the tent city protesters are trying to bring back is a sense of collective responsibility and social justice for which Israel was once famous (and, no, I'm not interested in getting into a wider discussion of Middle-East politics here). Israel and Tel-Aviv's current tensions reflect the new inequalities that have been plaguing our globalized world for some time now. Brazil is obviously an extreme example, especially for a country with so much natural wealth.

If Israel can find a way to bring its society back into balance, fairer and more equal, obviously without snuffing out its famous entrepreneurial dynamism and creativity, perhaps this rebalancing act could serve as a beacon for others ? We all now live in a world that, in its mad rush for gowth, is in danger of losing more than it gains.

Update: interesting perspective here.