An estimated 10,000 people participated in a social justice demonstration in Tel Aviv on Saturday night.

Together with smaller rallies in Jerusalem and Haifa, this was the largest protest in Israel so far this summer, but still they were relatively small compared to last year's, which saw as many as 300,000 people taking to the street.

Saturday night's demonstration came after weeks of attempts by leaders of last summer's demonstration to rekindle the spirit. However, until Saturday their efforts had largely failed.

Much of last year's focus was on the cost of living, which was symbolized by tent encampments established across the nation. But, when tents were put up last week along trendy Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv - the site of last year's main tent city - they were promptly removed by the municipality.

"The first time it was really exhilarating, people felt that they could voice their complaints and the democracy works quite well," Dr. Itzik Saporta of Tel Aviv University told Xinhua on Sunday. Some 70 percent of Israelis support the goals of the protests, he argued.

"In the meantime, a lot of power in society, including the government, businesses and political parties started to meddle into the protests and some people felt that, although they want change, they don't feel as close to the protests as last year," said Saporta, an expert of organisational behavior with Recanati Business School's of Management.

Prof. Shlomo Mizrahi of Ben-Gurion University of Negev said that while the situation now has moved beyond the question of raw numbers of participants, the strength of protests should be judged in terms of real pressure exerted on the government.

"The numbers aren't so important and they aren't clear indications of the power of the protests," Mizrahi said.

"You can measure it in types of demands, for example, if they demand that the prime minister should resign then you can see a political demand, which wasn't made in last year's protests," he added.

Most of the requests last year focused on the problems of finding affordable housing, high prices of food and costs of child care, as protest leaders tried hard to stay out of party politics.

SLOW CHANGE

In order to address the issues raised in last year's protests, the government established a committee which presented last September its recommendations, including measures to add more affordable housing, free education from age of three and more taxes on the wealthy.

The government has approved the first two recommendations but so far it remains undecided on how to deal with the high concentration of control over Israel's economy.

Saporta said that last year's demonstrations were like a newborn baby, something exciting, and this year it's something like "a process that (people) have to continue to achieve what you want to achieve."

"Now people understand what it is to be involved in doing a protest. And inside the protests there are people that want different things, so there is also in some ways a competition within the protests," Saporta said.

IN NEED OF PATIENCE

Up until 1984, Israel was dominated by government-owned companies and unions. However, after a financial crisis in 1985, which saw record levels of inflation due to poor monetary policy, the government decided to implement a more market-oriented measures - a strategy that some of the protesters argue was the beginning of today's social and economic problems.

"There were changes but they weren't enough, and people have to understand that the changes that happened now were because of the protests and if you want more change you have to continue protesting," Saporta said.

Patience, however, is not a common virtue in Israel, and Saporta said that one has to understand that it takes time to change the views of the people and to convince elites in the government and academia that the way how the society works has to be changed.

"In the long run, it's much more important to have 10,000 activists who take the protests seriously, than one single demonstration with 500,000 people," Saporta said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week decided to raise Israel's deficit ceiling to three percent of the Gross Domestic Production instead of the 1.5 percent that he originally called for. The increased debt level will allow the government to continue some of the reforms that it implemented following last year's protests, without having to raise taxes.

Mizrahi believes that Netanyahu changed his stand after feeling the influence of protests.

"You can see that there is pressure and that they achieve things," he said.