Protesters Yearn for an Israel That Does More to Help Its People

Protesters Yearn for an Israel That Does More to Help Its People

JERUSALEM — The tent protest movement dominating Israel for three weeks focuses on the cost of living but is really about something deeper — the nature of the country’s social contract. Many Israelis feel that their sacrifices are not being repaid.

Israel’s majority Jewish citizens feel they have suppressed their individual needs for the perceived good of the community over the course of many wars. Indeed, the recent protest movement has a recent precedent: the tent-based demonstration of the family of Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit, abducted by Hamas and held in Gaza for the past five years. Sergeant Shalit has been one of the few points of collective yearning and accord in an often fractured society, and the protests reflect a belief — rightly or wrongly — that the government has not done all it can to gain his release.

Yet the frustration runs deeper. The shift from state-dominated quasi socialism to markets and privatization — a shift that arguably saved the country from economic collapse in the 1980s — has been accompanied by some sense of loss of community, spiking prices and the accumulation of great wealth in a few hands.

As with the Shalit movement, the current wave of protests over the cost of housing and basic goods stems partly from the feeling that the government stopped doing all it could and should for average citizens — making sure they were well housed and fed — and that the collective vision that animated Israel is being lost to a world of global capitalism and runaway individualism.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/06/world/middleeast/06israel.html?src=recg