A split in the protest movement.

• Author: Avnery, Uri
• Position: ISRAEL - Daphni Leef and Itzik Shmuli

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IT SOUNDS LIKE THE TITLE OF a romantic movie. Daphni, Itzik, and all the Others.

It starts off with a friendship between two youngsters, he in his early thirties, she in her mid-twenties. Then they quarrel. He leaves. She remains.

The audience knows exactly what it wants: It wants the two to reunite, kiss, marry, and walk arm-in-arm into the sunset, to the accompaniment of a soil melody.

As for the actors, they are perfect. They both play themselves. Hollywood's central casting couldn't have done better.

She is an attractive young woman, wearing a man's hat for easy recognition. He is the Israeli young male, vaguely handsome, easily recognizable by his nose.

The story starts with Daphni Leef, an editor of short films and the daughter of a composer, unable to afford an apartment in Tel Aviv. She is fed up. She announces on Facebook that she is going to live in a tent on Rothschild Boulevard and asks if anyone will join her.

Some do. Then more. Then even more. In no time, there are more than 100 tents on the avenue,

one of the oldest in town, a quiet residential neighborhood. Other tent cities spring up all around the country. A mass movement has come into being. On September 3, 350,000 people demonstrate in Tel Aviv, and 450,000 throughout the country. That would be something like eighteen million in the United States, or three million in Germany.

Sometime after the whole thing starts, the Israeli National Student Union, led by its chairman, Itzik Shmuli, joins the protest. Daphni and Itzik are seen as the leaders.

The media love them. They embrace them with a fervor never seen before, which is quite remarkable, since all the media are owned by the very same "tycoons" against whom the protesters are railing. The explanation may be that the average working journalist belongs to the same social group as Daphni and the other protesters: young middle-class men and women who work hard and still do not make enough to "finish the month."

Also, the media need ratings, and the public wants to see and hear the protests. No one could afford to ignore them, not even a tycoon.

Soon, the first signs of a split start to appear. After treating the protest with disdain, Benjamin Netanyahu sees the danger and does what he (and politicians like him) always do: He appoints a commission to propose "reforms." He neither promises to implement its recommendations, nor does he allow the commission to break the bounds of the two-year state...