Over 10,000 people were on hand motzei Shabbos in Tel Aviv to speak out against the government’s planned austerity plan. The renewed protest, last seen in the summer of 2011, was reminiscent of that grassroots effort known as the “cottage cheese protests”. Veteran protest leader Daphni Leef was on hand, explaining she and her colleagues put Yesh Atid and Bayit Yehudi in office and they are not about to remain silent at the newly-elected officials betray their campaign promises.
There were similar protests of a couple hundred people each held in Haifa and Yerushalayim, as well as a stormy protest against plans to develop natural gas near the home of Energy Minister (Likud) Silvan Shalom. At the latter, protestors clashed with police, leading to a number of arrests.
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
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3 Responses
if he succeeds in his plans he will be responsible for the Death of many Jews
1. He promised to balance Israel’s budget, and he’s keeping his promises. Israel does have a problem in that it provides welfare state benefits at a level that would be “rich” even for an affluent country, whereas it’s economy is anything but rich. This is the sort of behavior that got countries such as Greece and Spain into trouble.
2. Most of his supporters assumed he would balance the budget solely by stripping welfare from Hareidim, not themselves. Lapid played to this audience, even though he should have known that cuts targetted to hareidim would not be adequate. As an article of faith they believed that hareidim were living like kings and cutting them off would bring prosperity to the rest of Israel. Like most bigots, his hated blinded him (and his supporters), and not that reality struck it is painful to them (Baruch ha-Shem).
3. Given Israel’s extreme lack of economic freedom (e.g. banning most hareidi men from working, discrimination against both hareidim and Arabs – which come to 40% of the population, extreme crony capitalism, etc., it isn’t clear that market oriented economic policies will work at all, since such policies assume that cutting government involvement will encourage free markets to bloom, but Israeli policies prevent that from happening.
How lucky Silvan Shalom is! Fancy having a natural gas development near his home!