Organizers of Israel’s mass housing protest called on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday (Sunday) to engage in direct dialogue with them, blaming him for dismissing the people’s demands.
Some 150,000 demonstrators took to the streets on Saturday, and a top treasury official resigned on Sunday, raising questions from leading commentators over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ability to ride out a revolt by working class families.
During a press conference assembled by the housing protesters in Tel Aviv’s tent city on Rothschild Boulevard, the organizers said that Netanyahu must engage in direct and transparent discussions with the Israeli public, and not via government ministers. In transparent, the protesters mean that they require the negotiations be recorded and made public.
A huge banner of Che Guevara, a photo from Saturday night’s demonstration in Tel Aviv (Photo: Harry’s Place)
The protesters dismissed the promises, calling Netanyahu’s committee offer manipulative and threatening a bolstered protest effort if their demands are not met. “The numerous protest rallies held last night across the country, which were attended by 150,000 people, voiced our mutual outcry for social justice clearer than ever,” the initiator of Tel Aviv’s tent protest, Daphni Leef, said.
“It appears that the outcry made no impression on the prime minister, who insists on digging in his heels. The prime minister is apparently having trouble hearing the suffering and demands of the people he pretends to represent.
“A different language and behavior are forming in response to his deaf ears,” she added. “We come out on the streets and demand the system to be changed, while he establishes another committee and tries to escape his and his government’s basic responsibility towards us.
“Mr. Netanyahu, you must understand that on our part, there’s only one way that a dialogue can be held: with transparency, in front of all of us – the entire public – and not with a ministerial committee, but with you.” “Netanyahu must answer two basic demands: cancel the housing committees’ law, and to hold transparent discussions with the public in order to allow a real public debate on this subject for the first time,” added one of the organizers.
Another organizer commented on Netanyahu’s response to protester demands. “The prime minister is trying to frighten the public, by claiming that social justice will cause economic collapse,” he said, “He should open his eyes and understand that the collapse is already here. It is the economic system itself that had collapsed. It is this collapse that had brought the people to the streets in protest, here and now.” Though Netanyahu’s broad-based, neo-liberal governing coalition should keep him in office until the next election in 2013, polls show his personal approval rating has been plummeting.
The protesters are no longer limiting themselves to housing-related issues. They are also demanding a nation-wide free and egalitarian public school system from birth to matriculation, and government-backed financial aid for academic studies for those who need it. The protesters also expressed their support for the doctors’ strike saying all their demands are justified.
Another ‘strollers’ march’
Hundreds have gathers in Jerusalem yesterday afternoon, staging a second “strollers’ march” in protest of the high prices of daycare centers and nursery schools. Protesters began their march at the prime minister’s resident and will make their way to Gan Hasus (“Horse Park”), where they will join affordable housing protesters. A similar march is also being held in Pardess Hanna, near Haifa.
Like in the first “strollers’ march,’ parents participating in the Jerusalem protest are demanding a series of financial mitigation, including extending maternity leave to six months, tax mitigations for families, subsidizing basic baby products, free public transportation for babies and toddlers, maternity leave for fathers, and balancing the amount of vacation and child-sick days parents are allotted by law, to the actual number of vacation days given to children.
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