Hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets on Saturday night from across the political and social divides - Jews, Arabs, women, children, secular and even Orthodox. Bibi and his shills are running scared.
Despite desperate attempts by the zealots and the tycoons to pain this as some kind of left wing activism, most ordinary middle-class Israelis are not buying the fascists' scare-mongering or the actions of agents provacateurs.
For 63 years, the middle class has taken everything thrown at it, but social solidarity has broken down because they see some minority sectors - the settlers, the yeshivah students, the 12 powerful families who in effect govern Israel - getting all they want and more. Yet they have to carry the burden of high taxes and military service.
There's a great piece here in Hebrew which explains why this is a middle-class, non-partisan revolt.
http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4099211,00.html
And another here in English which shows why it's about time secular Zionists woke up
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4101990,00.html
The majority’s eldest son has been living in a tent for two weeks now, and the majority considers joining him there for one night, just so the kid knows that it thinks he and his friends are right. The majority looks at them and knows that they understood something that it doesn’t. The finance minister said on the radio that Israelis own more apartments than most other nationalities, a fact that drives the majority crazy: How could that be? Do 70% of the country’s residents have $600,000 lying around?
Because the other possibility is that the majority is the only one that paid the full price. All the others got some discount arranged. They didn’t have to pay property tax, they know someone in the Land Administration, and they have their own party who took care of them; they decided that God has to arrange a home on a hill for them for ideological reasons, with an ideological backyard.
Or maybe they just went ahead and built their home. There are regions in Israel, mostly in the south, where a person who wishes to buy a home brings his friends to do the job and starts building. The majority looks at them sometimes when it travels on Shabbat and knows that it wouldn’t dare do the same.
Just like the majority would not dare throw a parking ticket to the garbage. Only minorities can afford to throw tickets to the garbage. The majority goes to court and says that it’s truly sorry. It also adheres to the demolition order it received, at its own expense. This must truly make the minorities laugh.
The majority knows, of course, that the only reason it’s being harassed more than the others is that it’s possible. Because the majority is the only one in this country that doesn’t throw stones, that doesn’t burn anything, and that doesn’t raid the Supreme Court. The majority has never been to the Supreme Court.
Yet don’t write off the majority, because now, for the first time in many years, it has a chance. Because it became smaller and smaller and was pushed into a corner, and was angry quietly, until one day it got up in the morning, looked in the mirror, and discovered that something wonderful happened: It also turned into a minority.
It’s less than them; less wealthy, less connected, less political, and less influential. They’re the majority! They have a Knesset majority, a Treasury majority, a government majority; most budgets are earmarked for them and most decisions are in their favor. Finally, the majority is a minority and is allowed to behave like a minority.
The majority can now form alliances with other minorities. With the haredim who happen to want to work, with the religious who don’t think that Judaism is all about a hill in Samaria, and with the Arabs who want to perform national service. It can embrace them and tell them that it’s been screwed just like them, that it too had been forgotten, and that it no longer has to be the only one that safeguards the State, because the State disregards him in any case.
Why would it care? It’s only 42%.
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