AP Photo

This is the moving spirit of the movement. It is a challenge not just to Netanyahu but to the entire political system. Israel has many political parties. But at least since Ronald Reagan’s emissaries imposed monetarist fundamentalism in the mid-1980s, economic debate has usually been close to comatose. “Left” has come to be a synonym for dovish on foreign policy, “right” with being hawkish, and both terms have lost their economic meaning. Politicians identified both locally and abroad as being on the left have often sounded as Thatcherite as those of the right. Shaffir’s comments and the signs along Rothschild Boulevard calling for a “Welfare State Now” express Israel’s earlier social-democratic...