מפחד לזעם: פוליטיקה דיסטופית בישראל, 1995–2023

The 2023 Israeli protests are a major milestone in the transformation of dystopian thinking into an actual political agenda. This article offers some initiallines of thought toward the development of a sociology of meaning for the protest movement, identifying the movement’s origins in Israel’s crisis of mamlachtiyut (“responsible etatism”) and in the centrist camp’s attempts to reestablish it.The article tries to reinterpret the political events of 2021-2022, with particular attention to the element of rage that marked the protest dynamic – rage that was aresponse to a shattered dream. It reflects the widespread fear that the rise of a right-wing government sparked among Israel’s entrenched middle class, its political/legal establishment, its high-net-worth cadre, its senior executives, and its high-ranking retired military officers. In the protesters’ view, the government is brutallyunravelling the judicial status quo and driving the eruption of a major political rift.This rift also reflects the protest movement’s ethnic boundaries and may, perhaps,be indicative of the movement’s future.