Israeli anti-privatisation movement starting again

This video from Israel is called Tel Aviv Demonstration 3 September 2011.

By Jean Shaoul:

Israeli cabinet approves whitewash report on social crisis

13 October 2011

Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu on Sunday secured cabinet approval for the recommendations of the Trajtenberg “dialogue committee” on Israel’s social crisis. So limited are the recommendations that new demonstrations have been planned in response.

Netanyahu appointed economist Manuel Trajtenberg to head the committee in order to defuse the mass protest movement against the lack of affordable housing and soaring living costs.

The movement started as a tent city on Rothschild Boulevard in central Tel Aviv, but spread rapidly to other towns and cities and soon encompassed opposition to the “free market” reforms and the domination of the economy by a handful of billionaires. It culminated in 450,000-strong demonstrations on September 3, the largest in Israel’s history, testifying to the social crisis confronting working people and their families that is no different to that faced by masses throughout the Middle East.

Trajtenberg acknowledged some of the most obvious features of Israeli society: the “real, painful economic difficulty experienced by the backbone of Israeli society, working families, educated, with children who are not making ends meet”; the “deep sense of injustice,” that “has to do with the growing inequality in Israel” between the rich and the poor; and the “estrangement of the ordinary citizen from state institutions, a sense that the powers that be do not listen to him, and that the political system had severed itself from him.” …

Daphne Leef, one of protest leaders and a video editor for the New Israel Fund, rejected the Trajtenberg report, saying that the government had simply continued with the same policies that had produced the crisis in the first place. “Where is the public housing? The affordable housing?” she asked.

Leef said that if the government did not come up with serious suggestions then on October 29, “just as the Knesset [Israel’s parliament] is due to return from its break, we will return to the streets in full force.”

Stav Shafir, one of the student leaders who organised the tent city protests, is calling for students to strike at the beginning of the new academic year and close down universities and colleges following the protest rally on October 29.

Protest leader and National Student Union chairman, Itzik Shmuli, who works closely with Ofer Eini, the leader of the Histadrut trade union federation (which did cooperate with the Committee) only expressed disappointment with the proposals.

Protests seem to be everywhere now but very little comes close to what happened in Israel: a society transformed: here.