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LARRY DERFNER:
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Woman of valor

For Israelis who value economic equality, who believe it is no less important than economic freedom, who want the government to take more from the haves and give it to the have-nots — and this egalitarian streak cuts across Jews and Arabs, Left and Right, religious and secular — Vikki Knafo’s protest was the one good thing that happened in this country last year.

Her epic 200-km trek from Mitzpe Ramon, her triumphant entry to Jerusalem, and the magnetic power of her single mothers’ tent protest outside the Finance Ministry — if only at the beginning — were a burst of energy and constructive fury for the country’s poor and their advocates.

Her gesture had all the more power because it was so overdue — the recession, which has progressed in precise tandem with the intifada since September 2000, has chewed up the country’s poor, yet their calamity has been overshadowed by Palestinian terror. In fact, the cause of the poor has not been a high-profile issue in Israeli public life since early 1999, when Ehud Barak made it a central motif in his successful campaign for prime minister, after which he forgot about it in office as fast as he could.

Knafo’s timing was also crucial. An anonymous, 43-year-old cook and mother of three, she marched on Jerusalem during a brief lull in terror, when the media were open to other story ideas, and immediately after the Treasury made a cut in single mothers’ aid unprecedented in its severity.

It was the right time, Knafo was the right woman. She works part-time; nobody can accuse her of being a "welfare queen." By literally wrapping herself in the Israeli flag, she declared that the cause of the single mothers was a national, patriotic one. She is blessed with a highly photogenic smile. But above all, she conducted herself with dignity — never losing her cool even though she was thoroughly exhausted, had no experience as a political leader, and was under constant pressure from the media, politicians, activists and well-wishers — who, at the same time, kept her spirits up. She did this while spending her days and nights in and around a tent in the summer heat.

Vikki was an inspiration.

Her protest, at first, was an illustration of "people power." In her wake, several other single mothers hit the highways to Jerusalem from the Galilee and Negev. The number of tents multiplied, their population reaching a peak of about 100 families. Supporters came by the camp with parcels of food, and were filled themselves by the spirit created by a band of underdogs putting themselves on the street in public to get a little decent treatment for their families.

Knafo united people from opposing political allegiances. Meretz was probably the most visible party there, but plenty of Likudniks, too, showed up — those from the party’s grass roots, not from the inner circles around Binyamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon. Shas also turned out.

Most remarkably, the Jewish protesters, most of them Mizrahim from development towns and lower-class urban neighborhoods — the kind of Israelis who tend to be hardliners on Israel-Arab issues — were joined in the tents by a contingent of Arab single mothers. This was a feminist victory; the Arab women said they were at first reluctant to throw in with Knafo because in their patriarchal culture, women don’t step out into the public arena and call attention to themselves, certainly not by living in tents on the government’s doorstep.

But the greater significance was that Arabs decided to make common cause, in a very intimate way, with Jews — another thing that hasn’t happened since the intifada began.

While the single mothers won support from people across the political spectrum, and although the mothers themselves, like poor Israeli Jews in general, were most likely to be right-wingers, the protest played politically on the heartstrings of the Left, which is why it was adopted by the kibbutz movement, Meretz and the New Israel Fund, and by the strictly economic Left — the Histadrut and One Nation.

Knafo’s protest joined Amram Mitzna’s national political debut and the IDF "refuser" movement as the Left’s only high points during the intifada. Knafo, like Mitzna, like the refusers — the last of whom were opposed by most of the Zionist Left — proved that contemporary Israel is not a monolith of capitalists, nationalists and unconditionally obedient soldiers. (This, even though Knafo, Mitzna and the refusers wouldn’t like at all to be lumped together.)

They gave Israel one other thing the country has been missing since the start of the intifada — an opposition, and to this opposition they gave momentum.

But only for a while.

THIS IS not the place to go into why Mitzna and the refusers "lost altitude" so quickly, but Knafo was defeated by the fickleness of the media, the return of terror to command the public’s attention, and Netanyahu’s masterful counterattack that there really were jobs out there for these single mothers — and for the rest of the unemployed and underemployed — but they’d become addicted to welfare.

Slashing their welfare would be a kind of behavior modification to force them to work, he argued, and masses of Israelis who’d been touched by Knafo’s courage now nodded their heads to Netanyahu’s beat, and lost interest in the problems of the poor.

It was the new Israeli capitalism that led Dr. Yohanan Stressman, director of Israel’s welfare department, the National Insurance Institute, to resign at the beginning of this month.

"Social policy,‘ he said, ’is effectively being dictated by those who believe that strengthening the highest percentiles in the society is a worthy goal, even at the cost of widening economic gaps, which are already intolerable."

The single mothers were also defeated by their own inherent vulnerability.

They are particularly ill-equipped to wage a long, grueling protest to wear down the government — who will take care of their children while they’re living in tents in a city far from home? How long can the children stay outdoors with them? It was the simple physical and practical hardship of being poor women with children to raise, together with the steadily diminishing public interest and the government’s strategic indifference, that broke their spirit. As the start of the new school year approached, a stream of mothers and their children went home.

As a last-ditch attempt, Knafo and a half-dozen or so of her allies have gone on a hunger strike. On the afternoon of their first day, they sat at a bench talking quietly. There were no TV cameras, no supporters with them. The handwritten placards hung on tents that were empty.

"Most of them have left,‘ Knafo said. ’But I’m here."

Spent as she was, she still had that winning smile. Once, briefly, only a couple of months ago, it had inspired so many people in this country. Now it made one ashamed.