Jerusalem parents stroll for change

This sounds like a fabulous demonstration!

Jerusalem parents stroll for change

Thousands of children and their young fathers and mothers marched through the capital’s streets on Sunday evening, in a call to reduce living costs and enable them a decent future in the city and the country.

Departing from the Prime Minister’s Residence, where there was a large rally on the same theme the previous night, the families strolled down to King George Avenue’s Gan Hasus (Horse Park), where Jerusalem’s central protest tent city is located. Others have sprung up around the city.

According to police, a thousand adults took part in Sunday’s march....

The children and parents were then treated to storytelling by two of the country’s foremost authors. Meir Shalev read his story about The Tractor and the Sandbox, making minor alterations to change the protagonist tractor into the overworked Israeli middle class. David Grossman then captivated the audience with his story about a boy called Itamar who was afraid of rabbits.

To wrap things up, singer-songwriter-guitarist David Broza provided the thrilled parents and children with a passionate serving of some of the children classics he wrote and performed from his stellar The Sixteenth Sheep album, as well as more of his songs, including a reworked hit he and Yehonatan Geffen wrote 34 years ago, “Yihiye Tov” (Things Will Get Better), with the words updated to suit the spirit of the times and the protest.

Photos from the Israeli protests

I'm looking through a series of photos that Haaretz photographers have taken of the protests, and the first ones are from July 14 - when I was still in Israel (I left on the 17th). I had thought the protests started immediately after I left (oddly enough, the second Lebanon War in 2006 started two days after I left the country....). The first photos are of tents being erected on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv on July 14.

Some striking ones (to me): one from 7/17/11 in Beersheva, showing an ultra-Orthodox father and his children setting up a protest tent; one from 7/19/11 in Kiryat Shmona (a poor development town in the north), showing a small encampment of tents; another from the same date, showing tents in Tamra, an Arab town in the Galilee; 7/20/11 - protests tents in Jerusalem, just outside the walls of the Old City; a demonstration in Jerusalem on 7/25/11 that blocks Kikar Paris, with people being dragged away by they police. I remember Kikar Paris well from the first intifada, when Women in Black and Dai la-Kibush held frequent demonstrations there. Also from 7/25/11, a march in Beersheva, with a woman holding a sign that reads "the monster of the mortgages."

On Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, posters are put up with the names of the few wealthy individuals and families who now own the most of Israel:  David Weissman/Shraga Biran - owners of Dor Alon, Alon Energy, Rosebud Real Estate. David Azrieli - owner of Garnit ha-Carmel Investments, the Azrieli Malls, Globus movie theaters, Sonol gas stations, Bank Leumi. Isaac Teshuvah (gasoline companies) - owner of the Phoenix (investments), Delek Real Estate, Delek Cars - importer of Mazda and Ford, Delek Energy - Gas and Oil, Delek Israel - gas stations. Ofer Family - Israel Company, owning Bank Mizrahi Tefahot, Israeli Chemicals, Ofer Ships, Zim.

From 7/26/11 - a photo of a protest march in Haifa, with signs in Hebrew and Arabic, and people carrying Israeli flags and tents. From the same night - the protest march blocking the street, with one sign held high - "We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and today to the State of Israel." Also from the 26th, a photo of tents in Independence Park in Jerusalem, with a giant picture of Bib's face strung up above them. From 7/27/11 - a photo of a sign hung up on the Prime Minister's house in Jerusalem: "House for Sale. 5 Million shekels. For details - Bibi." The last few photos are of the "stroller protest" in Tel Aviv on 7/28/11 (I'm not sure what that is - I haven't yet read the articles about it).

Why are Israelis protesting for social justice?

When I was in Israel earlier this summer, the big local protest was about the cost of cottage cheese, which had been raised greatly in the last 2-3 years. The protest was started on Facebook by a haredi man and eventually gained 100,000 signatures. The three big dairy companies in Israel finally conceded and lowered the price. But this was only symbolic of the increasing discontent with rising prices of food, real estate, and everything else. I've commented for several years to my friends in Israel that the only housing being built in Jerusalem seems to be extravagantly expensive developments that only rich people from outside of the country can afford to live in. This has created the phenomenon in the city of "ghost" neighborhoods - blocks of luxury apartments that are largely uninhabited for most of the year, when their wealthy foreign owners visit the city. 

I was talking to some new friends this summer - a young couple with two children, one working as a teacher's assistant in a school for severely handicapped children, the other working in construction (yes, there are Jewish Israelis working as construction workers) - but he recently quit that job and started one that probably pays quite a deal less, working as a clerk at a grocery story. My guess about their income is that they make around 7,000 shekels a month (=about $2000). They're living in a rented apartment, where I would guess the rent is around 2500-3000 shekels per month. The night I got together with them, they were discussing an apartment for sale that a friend had told them about - for 900,000 shekels (=about $264,000). Could they afford an apartment at that price?As a young couple, they could get some funding from the government, but that wouldn't cover very much, and they'd end up with an enormous mortgage, if a bank would lend to them.

It's the situation of people like them that is driving these protests.

Another significant development over the past years is the privatization of big parts of the Israeli economy that used to belong to the government. These companies now belong to enormously rich people (the "oligarchs" - like the Russian oligarchs who ended up dominating that economy after the fall of communism). After talking to some friends this summer, I finally grasped that this is one big reason why the gap between rich and poor has grown so immense in Israel. Israel is also a high-tech incubator, but that has also added to the increasing gap. Of all the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (which Israel just joined last year), Israel has the biggest gap.

..... the country is still at the bottom of the rankings. Every fifth Israeli is twice as poor as the average person in OECD member states. Most of the poor come from Arab and ultra-orthodox communities, where poverty rises to 50 percent and 60 percent, respectively. More than half of Israelis are paid less than NIS 4,000 a month, while only a very few make many times as much.

You don't hear much of this in the foreign press, or even the Jewish press in America - the economic stories I have read recently about Israel are all about the high-tech sector, leaving behind the more than half of Israelis who don't make more than $1200 per month.

"The people want social justice" - protests in Israel

Has the Arab Spring come to Israel? If you expect to learn about this by reading the New York Times or listening to NPR, you're out of luck - they haven't discovered the story yet. But fortunately we have some independent journalists from Israel reporting on something different from the usual hopeless Israel-Palestinian conflict stories.

My friend Gershom Gorenberg reports from Jerusalem:

The dead have come to life.

I saw them marching tonight through Jerusalem, jumping, swaying, pounding pots and water-cooler bottles as drums, the Israelis in their twenties who’d been written off in a thousand political obituaries as dead of terminal apathy, sweating in the absurd heat close to midnight, roaring so deep you could hear their throats tearing in anger and in joy at being angry together and being alive again.

‘People before Profits’ (Gershom Gorenberg)

They came flooding down from Zion Square through Independence Park and up Agron Street to the square outside of one of Netanyahu’s three homes, and they sang an old kindergarten song about “my hat has three corners” rewritten as “my Bibi owns three houses,” and they overflowed up onto the walls and fences past the sidewalks and they danced with mad happiness at seeing each other.

They chanted “The people want social justice!” and “What’s the answer to privatization? Re-Vo-Lu-Tion!” and waved flags, both blue-and-white and red. They cheered for the Arab medical student telling the government it has to pay for health care, and for the teacher decrying the pure insult of treating teachers as temp workers, and for the rabbi quoting Isaiah....

For those reading from abroad, I also note that so far, foreign editors have completely missed what’s happening here, because the stories they expect from Israel are about war and terror and peace talks, so they haven’t gotten their minds around two weeks of protests that just keep getting bigger, Israelis inspired by Egypt, demanding what was once the basic minimum here before the poison of privatization arrived: free education, free health care, affordable apartments.

Read the whole thing.

For more coverage, from +972: Marches for Social Justice in Israel.

Huge protests in cities across Israel signal they are a growing political force

The housing and social protests tonight reached a huge crescendo, with throngs flooding streets in over 10 cities across the country Israel. Haaretz is reporting roughly 150,000 people around the country in Hebrew (most conservative estimate in the morning papers belongs to the pro-Netanyahu free paper, Israel Hayom: 100,000 protesters).

Compared to the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 who demonstrated last week, the number of protesters around the country may have more than quadrupled.

In Tel Aviv, the roar of frenzied euphoria mixed with anger preceded the crowd as the parade rounded a major intersection on its way to the Tel Aviv museum. Screams of “revolution” were echoed all over the country. Estimates speak of 10,000 in Jerusalem, similar numbers in Haifa and Beer Sheva, along with demonstrations in Kiryat Shmona, Nazareth, Ashdod several other locations.

Like last week, the Tel Aviv demonstration ended with a large and loud sit-in at a major traffic intersection (Dizengoff and Kaplan streets); police formed human chains to block streets, mounted police appeared, and eventually called to break up the protesters. Eight were arrested and released in the following morning.

At first glance, it appeared that the crowd’s demands were not significantly different from last week. The main rallying cry was still: “The people! Want! Social justice!” with a generous dose of “Bibi go home,” as well as anti-capitalism, pro-welfare state slogans, all laced with dripping sarcasm along the lines of: “The market is free, but we’re slaves.”

Over the last two weeks, the protests have been criticized as unfocused and lacking concrete demands. Tonight there were new signs of a plan taking shape. In the final speeches, after a lineup that included celebrity musicians, the organizers wrapped up with several quite specific demands. In what sounded very much like an ultimatum, they said that Netanyahu has until Wednesday, the day the Knesset goes on recess, to do two things: Withdraw the pending law for national housing committees – which they consider deeply damaging  - and prevent the privatization of the Israel Lands Administration, which holds the vast majority of land in Israel.

On Sunday, Netanyahu has announced that a team of ministers would meet the representatives of the protest movement. The director of Israel’s finance ministry has resigned in the morning following the protest, citing the protest among his reasons.