MK Khenin: Netanyahu’s Iranian Threat – Diverting the Public’s Attention from Housing Prices

Four years after the 2011 social protest movement brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets, the tents are back on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard. On Sunday evening, March 1, approximately 200 persons re-initiated the tent protest, in a demonstration against the high cost of living and housing in Israel. In a rally held at the site, MK Dov Khenin (Hadash) from the Joint List accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of using the specter of an Iranian nuclear bomb to ignore the country’s rapidly increasing housing prices.

Activists have pitched their tents again on Rothschild Boulevard, three and a half years after the 2011 social protest movement, Tel Aviv, March 1, 2015.

Activists have pitched their tents again on Rothschild Boulevard, three and a half years after the 2011 social protest movement, Tel Aviv, March 1, 2015. (Photo: Activestills)

MK Khenin spoke before hundreds of people at Sunday’s housing protest rally: “Netanyahu is sending young people to live in the shadow of the Iranian bomb,” he said. “Aside from his ill-fated foreign policy, his disregard for the housing problem is particularly infuriating.” His comments came less than a week after a damning report by the state comptroller found the government had failed to address skyrocketing housing prices.

Neo-liberal Netanyahu responded to the report by saying that while it was important, it paled in comparison to the seriousness of the Iranian threat, a reaction that infuriated many. Khenin said the comptroller’s report was evidence that “neo-liberal policies has failed to deal with the housing crisis.” Housing costs rose some 55 percent between 2008 and the end of 2013, the report by State Comptroller Yosef Shapira found last week. Rents, too, rose during that period by approximately 30%.

Several social justice campaigners joined the Sunday tent encampment, including “Milky protest” leader Naor Narkiss, Hadash and Communist Party of Israel activists, and recently evicted residents from the former Givat Amal neighborhood in Tel Aviv.

On Sunday, the Likud asked the Tel Aviv municipality to break up the protest camp, but the municipality refused. Three activists from neo-liberal Netanyahu’s Likud party managed to convince the organizers to let them address the crowd, but they were shouted down by anti-Netanyahu jeers. A shoving match broke out and the Likud activists were spirited away from the site.

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