Protest in Israel

"Landep News"

Protest in Israel

Israel is engulfed in social protests over the policies of the Netanyahu government toward social protection. What started a few months ago with an almost symbolic “tent revolution” against housing prices grew into the 250,000 Israelis rally on Saturday.
The phenomenon is deemed as the most serious challenge to Netanyahu’s government and comprises all kinds of people, from students to retired people, from Holocaust survivors to taxi drivers.
Young parents strolled on Tel Aviv’s boulevards, demanding the government for better childcare. Farmers decided to flood with milk an intersection with traffic to manifest their dissatisfaction at the low incomes they are making.

From housing prices and the control on gas price, demands escalated until it reached the demand for a new taxation system (with higher direct taxes and lower indirect ones), free education and childcare, the end of privatization of state companies.

Protest in Israel

There is even talk about imposing price controls on basic goods and the end of the neo-liberal policies.

The protests are kind of surprising in a country where an economic growth of 3.7 percent but they are caused by some sort of frustration of the middle class people, who see their life style threatened by the high cost of services and many basic goods.

The price of housing is high because more than 90 percent of the land of Israel belongs to the state. Then, in banking and retail the competition lacks because Israeli market is too isolated to attract foreign companies.

The nostalgia for Zionist Socialism is another reason for the people of Israel to protest. There was a time, not long ago, in the history of Israel when a daring program was implemented by the Socialists.

Many Israelis want to revert to that kind of egalitarianism the neo-liberalism of Netanyahu’s thinking has shattered.

The revolt of the middle class is also directed towards ultra-Orthodox, whose life style depends on handouts from other states that support their large families, and towards the settlers in the West Bank, who have many public benefits as compared to those of the people inside the Green Line.

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