protests in Israel

A few were there for a month and they said they were not moving till all their demands were met!!

They said Cairos Tahrir has come to Israel!

 

Carol Gould Jewish writer and broadcaster who was interviewed recently.

"Well, some people have said; observers have said that the government of Israel has suddenly announced this massive number of new [settlement] houses to make the world think that they are helping the people who are protesting. No, one has nothing to do with the other.

These are people who are middle class like me, but who can't afford their rent, who can't afford their food. The Israeli economy is teettering a bit. The rich is getting richer, as they are here in Britain, as they are in America, as they are in many western countries.

The poor are getting poorer and the poor no longer are literally people in the street or in ghettoes.
The poor include middle class families who are going to soup kitchens. So the Israeli government is trying to make it as if they are doing a good thing when in fact it's not those people who are going to live in the settlements where there will be religious settlers. "

 

ABU sina , I hope you find this also of some interest , its from Jews forJustice site reprint from Palestine Chron :


For Arab citizens, the tent city protests are a bourgeois conflict over colonial spoils .

Nearly three weeks ago angry young residents of Tel Aviv took to the streets to protest soaring housing prices. The protests have rapidly reached different sectors of the Israeli society. The Israeli media has propagated the event as a glorious democratic manifestation, while Western media rushed to compare it to the people revolutions in neighboring Arab countries.

Yet it must be recalled that by far the Tel Aviv protests are taking place within the Zionist consensus. For many Arab citizens, the protests are widely seen as a bourgeois distributional conflict over Zionist colonial spoils. No wonder the protests are directed against high housing prices per se rather than against the founding policies and fundamental causes behind the crisis.

We should remember that the real victims of the state’s housing policies are not the middle-class Jewish Israelis longing for the exclusive and luxurious privileges offered by the Tel Aviv center. They are the poor Arab residents of Jaffa who have been pushed out of the city by decades of ethnic gentrification, urban exclusion and alienation.

In the meantime, the Israeli media reports the event as if the Arab population, the real victims of the state’s economic policies, does not exist. The real narrative- the dispossession, the disempowerment, the unrelenting daily grind of injustice and discrimination, and the daily violation of human rights and dignity – does not fit into the format of the Israeli media’s agenda.

When a year ago Arab residents of Jaffa took to the Ajami neighborhood to protest the new housing plan designed exclusively for Zionist-Jews, known as Be’emuna Jews-Only housing project, they were dismissed as subversives to the state’s Jewish character. When they later marched to Jerusalem to demonstrate ahead of the High Court hearing over the project, they were widely presented as a punch of unruly Arabs. Requests and petitions by Ajami residents to stop work in the project have been unanimously dismissed by the Tel Aviv District Court and the High Court of Justice.

While the shortage of housing had been threatening Arab residents of Jaffa for decades, the Israel Lands Administration gave itself a right to sell public land to a construction company devoted to pushing Arab residents out of the city. Nothing has been done to stop Bemuna’s attempts to dilute Arab neighborhoods by moving in religious Zionist Jews at the expense of local residents. Nor to address Be’emuna’s repeated racist statements, discriminatory marketing methods and housing policies. The “domino effect” of the project has instead brought more and more racist housing projects to Jaffa.

The process of internal occupation of Arab lands is by no means confined to Jaffa. Judaization is expanding all over the country from the Negev region in the South down to the Galilee in the North, including the Arab Triangle in the center, and the major mixed cities of Haifa, Acre and Jerusalem. Policies of transfer, dislocation, land expropriation and housing demolition continue uninterrupted. Statics show that over the past few decades, Arab lands in Israel were rapidly diminished from nearly 19.5 million dunams (in 1947) to only 404 thousand dunams (in 2005). At the same time, Jewish settlements inside Israel has grown from 317 to 907, and they now constitute 96 percent of the country territory.

Moreover, we have not seen a single protest against the wave of fascist and racist laws directed against the Arab population, starting from the Nakba law through the loyalty law, and multiple bills regulating admission to “Jews-only” communities. Protests by Arab residents were rather rooted out by state violence and widely condemned by the Israeli society. Only when the state’s economic policies began to threaten the narrow interests of the White Ashkenazi society did they draw attention and media coverage.

It can be argued that bourgeois Israeli Jews are now paying the prize that Arabs in Israel have been paying for decades. But we should remember that soaring housing prices in Tel Aviv are themselves the outcome of the racist policies that were originally designed to prevent Arabs and other poor Jewish communities from approaching the city center. We should also ............

READ MORE :


http://jfjfp.com/?p=24597

cheers.

 

I'm wondering whether the incumbent government is so unpopular that it will not be able to legitimise its plans for war with Iran or the crushing of the Palestinian Statehood movement. Unfortunately, those waiting in the wings, such as Livni, are already bloodstained and worthless as leaders themselves.

 

The US could facilitate an Israeli air strike on Iran. The use of AWAC data, air-to-air refueling outside Iranian airspace or the use of an American runway in Turkey or Iraq would greatly assist such an air strike. America's hands would be well-gloved and the Israelis would take the blame for the military action against nuclear installations.

 

' Well gloved ' ? Seriously, ' Well gloved ' ?


Anyway, putting aside the kindergarten view of US of AIPAC SECRET misdeeds ;