The protests in Rothschild Boulevard
Normally Israel generates a disproportionate amount of news. In other words, it’s a small country where too much is happening. Consequently the international news media is disproportionately represented here. Furthermore, whenever our neighbours threaten us, or feel threatened by us, the foreign news media bureaus call in reinforcements to handle the reporting of the impending campaign/war. However, even during periods of relative quiet this hyperactive country manages to produce plenty to write home about. .
Therefore I was surprised to discover lately that most of the printed and electronic news networks had little or nothing to report about Israel.
Understandably, the US debt crisis, Europe's economic woes and trouble elsewhere including the Middle East, take precedence over our domestic unrest. However, when more than 150,000 Israelis flocked to the city squares to demonstrate on Saturday night most of the news bureaus deemed the phenomenon a non-event. .
For example the BBC reported a minor exchange of fire on the Lebanese border but ignored the wave of protests and demonstrations taking place all over Israel.
Maybe the foreign news bureaus are better geared to report battles than cottage cheese boycotts. It seems that until further notice we no longer interest the world.
Of late foreign correspondents stationed here are at a loss to explain why Israelis are discontented.
Whenever they ask government spokespersons to comment on the demonstrations and protest marches they are told our economy is more buoyant than ever. Government ministers from the prime minister himself down to the lowliest of ministers without portfolio and heads of ministerial bureaus insist that we've never had it so good! Even the irreproachable Stanley Fisher, President of the Bank of Israel, confirms that the country's economic standing is good. While the US totters on the brink of insolvency and the EU is battling to save its currency and the economic viability of its weaker member states, Israel is enjoying a boom.
Economic growth has increased and unemployment has reached an almost unprecedented low point.
Many Israelis are also finding it difficult to understand this contradiction.
If the state of the nation is so good why are thousands of people camping out in tent compounds all over Israel demanding affordable housing? Why are the doctors, students, dairy farmers, single parents and many others calling on the government to ease their economic burden? Why are they all demanding a new social order?
At this juncture permit me to briefly summarise the series of protests that are gaining momentum and maybe threatening the government's tenure.
The doctor's strike didn't really make much headway till the chairman of the Israeli Medical Association Dr. Leonid Edelman started his hunger strike and led a march to Jerusalem to protest by the prime minister's residence. This took place in tandem with all the other demonstrations and .benefited from good news media coverage.
The current spate of demonstrations started when an increase in the price of cottage cheese triggered a nationwide boycott of that product. It began with a Facebook call to consumers not to buy cottage cheese The response was surprisingly successful and ended when the retailers reduced the price.
Consumers organisations and other public bodies have often criticised the news media for ignoring the massive concentration of corporate power in the hands of a small group of Israeli business groups and families.
A parliamentary report on the concentration of corporate power published last year confirmed that too few people are controlling too many enterprises. It stated that 10 large business groups control 30% of the market value of public companies, while 16 control half the money in the entire country.
The Bank of Israel already says the country has one of the highest concentrations of corporate power in the developed world,far more than in most western economies. When Israel was admitted to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development its chairman urged the government to address the high level of corporate concentration in this country.
Prime Minister Netanyahu is an MIT economics graduate and a fervent advocate of unrestricted market economy. So far his efforts to privatise government owned companies haven't increased competition. Instead they have tended to accelerate the process of corporate concentration
One of the problems, according to the OECD, is that Israel's big business houses exert control through "cascading ownerships, pyramidal structures and cross-holdings".
In these pyramid structures holding companies control subsidiaries, which control their own subsidiaries, and so on until the top of the pyramid can technically control a company at the bottom with less than 10% of the capital.
Another parliamentary committee investigating the problem of corporate concentration is due to publish its findings in the coming weeks.
If the committee agrees with those assessments it could recommend breaking up the biggest oligopolies and opening Israel's market to new competition and investment, both foreign and local. Though nothing has been decided, change looks increasingly likely.
This ongoing public outcry is very much a spontaneous grass-roots phenomenon. Understandably the protesting groups are loath to accept a defined political identity. They are grateful for the moral support and encouragement they are receiving from various political bodies but clearly don’t want their struggle to have a political brand-name.
Here and there a few unruly demonstrators have been detained temporarily by the police, however there have been no clashes and no shots fired. By contrast the protests in Syria have met with a brutal government response.
If the motley array of Israeli protest groups failed to draw the attention of the foreign news media, other protests in our region haven't gone unnoticed. Syrian president Bashar al- Assad continues to ruthlessly crush every attempt to oppose his autocratic rule. This week when Syrian armoured units bombarded Hama, the country's fourth largest city, an editorial in the Washington Post expressed a certain déjà vu , " After all, Hama was the site of one of the most infamous massacres in the history of the Middle East — a 1982 assault ordered by Mr. Assad’s father that killed tens of thousands. Surely, the experts opined, the world has changed enough that the regime would not even attempt to repeat its extraordinary crime." In the 1982 massacre between 30,000 and 40,000.people were killed. So far more than 2,000 people have been killed in the current civil unrest in Syria. The editorial noted that, "Assad is calculating that those who suppose that dictators can no longer get away with massacres are wrong. He has some basis for that conclusion: NATO may have intervened in Libya to prevent the slaughter of civilians by Moammar Gaddafi, but Western leaders have publicly and vehemently ruled out intervention in Libya. The U.N. Security Council has failed to speak out against Mr. Assad’s assaults on other cities, as has the Arab League."
The Financial Times had nothing to write about Israel, however the attack on Hama received some attention. “The international community must do more to stem Mr Assad’s savagery. True, military action along the lines deployed against Muammer Gaddafi is not an option. Russia and China consider that the intervention in Libya exceeded the mandate granted by United Nations resolution 1973, and will not allow a similar motion on Syria to pass the Security Council. But there are other, non-military steps that the international community can, and should, take.
The first is to increase diplomatic pressure on Damascus. That means challenging Mr Assad’s delusional narrative that the violence is the work of foreign-sponsored ‘armed groups’.
Robust condemnation from the UN Security Council would also help. Both moves would make the international climate more conducive to broadening and toughening economic sanctions on the regime. Capital flight and the collapse in government revenues – particularly from tourism – caused by the four-month-old popular uprising have left Mr Assad and his cronies desperately short of cash. The European Union’s move on Monday to expand its asset freeze and travel restrictions on Syrian government officials is welcome.”
Thomas L. Friedman also preferred tackling Assad’s brutality to mentioning our bloodless orderly demonstrations. In 1982 Friedman was a NYT correspondent in Beirut and managed to visit Hama shortly after the massacre ordered by Hafez al-Assad. He wrote, “This was an act of unprecedented brutality, a settling of scores between Assad’s minority Alawite regime and Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority that had dared to challenge him.
Hama Rules were the prevailing leadership rules in the Arab world. They said: Rule by fear — strike fear in the heart of your people by letting them know that you play by no rules at all, so they won’t ever, ever, ever think about rebelling against you.” Today Friedman thinks Bashar al-Assad won’t be able to crush the current uprising.
Have a good weekend
Beni 4th of August, 2011
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