weirdloadreboot.com | If you were to buy into the American Conservative fantasy of Israel you might imagine the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv filled with Orthodox Jews carrying Uzis, wearing big, black hats, and searching for the next bit of Palestinian territory that they can park mobile homes on and call Israel. Either that image or the particularly paternalistic imaginings of American fundamentalist and Glenn Beck where the Israelis are a nation of Anne Franks caught between the inhumanity of the Nazi ovens and a screaming mass of Ishmael's children. Neither cliche is correct in any way. Like the real world tends to be, modern Israel is a troubled, complicated place with no easy answers and not pat conclusions. If one were to watch only American media you might think that the only thing going in modern Palestine is the fratricidal struggle between the Jews and Palestinians with every, single Israeli marching lock step behind Bibi and his cast of war criminals.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, inside of Israel and apart from security concerns the main crisis facing the Israeli people (Jew and Palestinian Arab alike) is economic just like it is here on the streets of America. Arab Spring may have morphed into something global and not as easily defined considering that the over 400,000 Israelis that marched last weekend on the streets of Tel Aviv openly identified with the Egyptian protestors of Cairo's Tahir Square.
Last weekend's rally drew over 400,000 people, over twice as many as the previous week’s protest. Demonstrators chanted, echoing the Tahrir revolution, “The people wants social justice. ” They marched for a higher quality of life and standard of living. They rallied against the deterioration of housing, educational, and job opportunities, the decline in quality of health care. They demonstrated against a slavishly capitalistic, laissez-faire government which cares only for corporate profits and a draconian anti-Arab foreign policy. sound familiar? If it does there is a good reason. Demonstrators in Tunisia, Egypt, Tel Aviv, Portugal, Syria, and now on the streets of American cities with the #occupy movement are talking about the same things, the same concerns. These are not simply "American" concerns that we hear shouted from the streets of New York to Durham, North Carolina… these are HUMAN concerns. What is happening ig happening on a global scale and cannot simply be viewed through the prism of American history and experience.