georgephillip
Diamond Member
What happens when the Arab Spring morphs into an Israeli Summer?
Let's ask Dafni...
"It started in mid-July, when Dafni Leef, a Tel Aviv filmmaker, was met with a hike in her rent that she couldn't afford to pay. Instead of moving to a new apartment, she moved to a tent on Rothschild Boulevard, the city's sleekest thoroughfare, and set up a Facebook event calling for her compatriots to join her.
"And they did: first, scattered hundreds - then, on Saturday, July 30, over 300,000 people in Tel Aviv alone, with tents mushrooming across the country, in self-conscious defiance of state-peddled neoliberalism...
"Polls suggest that 87 percent of Israelis support the protests.
"Among them are 98 percent of Kadima voters and 95 percent of Labor voters, the bastions of the middle class and the upper-middle class.
"But 85 percent of Bibi Netanyahu's Likud, which tends to draw support from poorer Mizrahi sectors, also supports the protests, indicating the breadth - if not the depth - of popular support for those out in the streets."
Israeli Tent Protests Ignore Link Between Neoliberalism, Occupation | Truthout
While Israeli elites maintain these protests are "social" and not "political", this could well be an early foreshadowing of later ruptures within Zionism. If those in the tents choose economic justice over occupation and loyalty to the state, Israel will become the only Democracy in the Middle East.
Let's ask Dafni...
"It started in mid-July, when Dafni Leef, a Tel Aviv filmmaker, was met with a hike in her rent that she couldn't afford to pay. Instead of moving to a new apartment, she moved to a tent on Rothschild Boulevard, the city's sleekest thoroughfare, and set up a Facebook event calling for her compatriots to join her.
"And they did: first, scattered hundreds - then, on Saturday, July 30, over 300,000 people in Tel Aviv alone, with tents mushrooming across the country, in self-conscious defiance of state-peddled neoliberalism...
"Polls suggest that 87 percent of Israelis support the protests.
"Among them are 98 percent of Kadima voters and 95 percent of Labor voters, the bastions of the middle class and the upper-middle class.
"But 85 percent of Bibi Netanyahu's Likud, which tends to draw support from poorer Mizrahi sectors, also supports the protests, indicating the breadth - if not the depth - of popular support for those out in the streets."
Israeli Tent Protests Ignore Link Between Neoliberalism, Occupation | Truthout
While Israeli elites maintain these protests are "social" and not "political", this could well be an early foreshadowing of later ruptures within Zionism. If those in the tents choose economic justice over occupation and loyalty to the state, Israel will become the only Democracy in the Middle East.