More than 300 thousand people took the streets of Tel Aviv. They were demanding better salaries, control of prices, peace and a "welfare state".
The Israeli ruling right wing (call it Labor, Likud, or Kadima; they’re all the same) has persuaded Israel’s middle class that peace is unnecessary: we can both run the occupation and have a Western standard of living. As evidence, they point at Israel’s membership in the OECD, the exclusive club of the world’s richest economies, or at Israel’s prosperous high-tech industry.
The idea sounds perfect: the regime knows that the Israeli middle class would refuse to pay for the occupation. The regime is unwilling to give up the occupation, so it convinces the masses that the occupation has no economic price for them. We don’t need peace: we can go on like this and have a good life. (Convincing Israelis that the other side does not want peace is another component of the same ideology.)
But to keep this lie alive, they have to deliver. And the Israeli governments cannot deliver. The middle class hears the promises of the good life and reads reports on diminishing unemployment rates and strong growth, but it sees a different reality: it gets poorer all the time. I see it all around me: hard-working parents cannot raise their children — let alone buy a flat — without massive aid from their own parents. “Grandparents are not an ATM,” as some protesters write on their posters.
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