The People Demand Social Justice: The Social Protest in Israel as an Agoral Gathering

Abstract

The summer of 2011 has seen the first mass-scale social protest in Israel in its 70 years of existence. This social wave that shook the country, showed unique characteristics a-typical of most social and political uprisings, that go largely unexplained by social theories of social change and crowd psychology. In this article I am analyzing published reports of the social protest of 2011, and draw the analogy with the concept of ‘Agoral Gathering’ that may account for these events and support discussion of their aftermath.

Keywords

• agoral gathering
• social protests
• crowd behavior
• social change