Reply #9: Ding ding we have a winner

[malaise]

By the way do you know that in Israel right now there is an Israeli summer with thousands of people camped out in Tel Aviv. You haven't seen that on M$Greedia either.

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article...
<snip>
During the past few weeks hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in Israel have decried the economic shortcomings of their country in an unprecedented expression of socio-economic discontent. Israel, as opposed to the images in the media, is not just a story of conflict with the Arabs. It is high time for people outside Israel to recognize that Israelis, like everyone else, have the same daily concerns about raising a family, building a home and making ends meet, albeit in rather exceptional circumstances.

Israeli domestic politics, however, can never be entirely divorced from the world in which Israel operates. There are linkages between the upheaval in Israel and developments in the neighbourhood that impinge upon the capacity of any Israeli government to meet the demands of the social protest. Domestic decision-making is affected by the turmoil in neighbouring Arab states and by the countdown to the Palestinian approach to the UN to recognize the independent state of Palestine within the 1967 boundaries, which Israelis see as an effort to coerce them into a withdrawal without negotiations.

The demonstrators are protesting the unaffordable prices of housing and consumer goods and the general demise of the welfare state. Relative egalitarianism was the pride of Israel in its early years as a moderate socialist experiment. In recent decades Israel underwent amazing economic development that has catapulted the country into the 21st century as a high-tech marvel.

These achievements, however, were obtained at the expense of Israel’s welfare state. Privatization of state enterprises has been economically efficient but resulted in the enriching of the few and the widening of the gulf between the “tycoons” and the rest.