Anti-Neoliberal Protest and Neoliberal Outcomes: The Appropriation and Translation of the Tents Protest By the Trachtenberg Committee

This article examines the ways in which the Trajtenberg Committee report diagnosed the causes underlying the 2011 protest (tents protest) in Israel, the identity of its carriers, and the policy instruments it suggested to address the protesters' claims. We use a critical discourse analysis method to disclose the policy paradigm – the construction of social problems, target population and policy instruments – that was used to give meaning to the demands of the protesters and to translate them into policy proposals (agenda setting). Our argument is that the Trajtenberg Committee appropriated the rhetoric of the protest, but it translated this rhetoric into policy proposals through a combination of a neoliberal economic and social policy that was softened at its margins with insights of the social investment model – a European policy heartening the development of human capital in the context of knowledge economy. We further suggest that the Trajtenberg Committee's report reconstructed the Israeli hegemonic project in the neo-liberal era. Our analysis combines insights from the ideational turn in institutional analysis and the literature on the outcomes of social movements This combination makes it possible to understand a. How social movements' outcomes may contradict the protesters' motivations; and b. how the knowledge and discourse deployed by state agents (underpinned by policy paradigms) play a central role in the dilution of the protesters' demands and their demobilization.