...A few weeks ago, (click title to entry - thank you) the residents were strangers demonstrating against high housing costs in a country where prices for apartments have gone up 55 percent and rents 27 percent in five years. Now the tent city inhabitants are comrades in a cause. A single-issue protest has broadened into a younger generation’s demands for social justice and a fairer distribution of Israel’s resources.
“It started as a housing protest, but now it’s far wider,” said Adi Peled, a 30-year-old special education teacher. “Now there’s a unity in the air, a shared cause and common denominator that’s been missing from our alienated society.”
The housing crisis was a symptom, people said, of how middle-class and young Israelis are suffering despite the country’s booming economy. In a reverse image of the “tea party” movement in America, many Israelis are clamoring for more government involvement in the economy and greater redistribution of income. They say the government’s sell-off of state-owned companies and services in recent decades went too far and left people defenseless against the whims of the free market....
3,383 TENTS
...Three thousand, three hundred and eighty-three tents. (click here) That was the figure national police headquarters compiled from its seven districts around the country. Well in the lead was the Tel Aviv District, with 2,300 tents - 2,000 of them on Rothschild Boulevard; then the Central District, with 410; Jerusalem District, 245; Southern District, 200; Northern District, 130; Coastal District, 98. And finally, with a big round zero - "Nothing to report" - was the Judea and Samaria District.
The authorities' patience with the refugee camp on Rothschild is quickly running out. They have been dealing with complaints of theft and even of a few sexual assaults, some violent brawls, and ongoing requests from desperate neighbors for the removal of various hazardous items and obstacles. If there are many more disturbances of this kind, it is likely that Tel Aviv's municipality will issue eviction orders (even if as of this moment they deny entertaining such a notion ). After giving the residents time to pack up, it will vacate the tent camp by force - without infringing on demands for social justice, which will either be met or not by the powers-that-be, irrespective of what's happening on the boulevard....
