Israel Matzav

Israel's Alinskyites

I am sure that many of you are familiar with the word Alinskyite, being a reference to Saul Alinsky, the community organizer and radical activist who inspired the current President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama.

Jonathan Spyer argues that while the leaders of the current protests in Israel are Alinskyites, most of the protesters are not, and will not latch onto the radical ideas of those running the demonstrations. But he urges the government to be responsive to the rank and file demonstrators.

That demonstration leaders and organizers indeed have a political agenda is easy to spot. Many have clear affiliations indicating their hostility both to the current government and to mainstream Israeli positions. Funding is coming from the New Israel Fund and its operational group, Shatil.

Yehudit Ilani, for example, a leader of the protests in Jaffa, is an Israeli-Jewish member of the hardline, Arab nationalist party Balad, which openly supports dismantling Jewish statehood and the ‘”right of return” of Palestinian refugees, that is, Israel’s destruction. The party’s original leader, Azmi Bishara, fled Israel after coming under suspicion of spying for Hizballah and is now openly backing that group from exile. One of its elected members, Haneen Zoabi, supports a nuclear Iran.

Dafni Leef, another protest leader, is an employee of the New Israel Fund. Alon Lee Green, another of the most prominent organizers, is a member of Hadash, the Israeli Communist Party. And so on.

Their motive in promoting social protest is highly political. The Israeli public long ago rejected their positions on the key national issues facing the country, thus consigning them to political irrelevance. They hope social issues will gain them re-admission to the debate. As Dimi Reider, a far-left activist and journalist, explained it:

We have been protesting against the occupation for decades and the number of our support keeps dropping. If we want to reach out to a broad section of the population, we need, at least temporarily, to put the occupation aside.

And yet these manipulators are able to gain an audience only because a large section of Israel’s population, with much justification, feels the burden being placed on them is impossible. Skilled and educated professionals are expected to work for salaries a mere fraction of those earned by their contemporaries in other developed countries. At the same time, food and consumer goods prices in Israel are among the highest in the West. Apartment prices, too, have reached a point where purchasing a property has become a distant dream for many young couples.

This population is not a crowd of freeloaders. Rather, they are the patriotic and responsible young individuals and families on whose commitment the survival and flourishing of Israel depends.

My sense is that the government understands that it must be responsive to the rank and file demonstrators. But it's difficult to tell whether the demonstrators understand that going back to the socialism of the '60's is not the answer. The media only talk to the leaders.

On Sunday morning, as I was riding home from Hadassah hospital in a taxi, the news came on, and the lead item was about a doctors' strike in every hospital in the country. I was reminded of my father's quip from 30 years ago that in Israel, half the country is always on strike, and the other half is watching. (On one trip here, there was a ground workers' strike in the airport, and Dad remarked that there were more ground workers at Ben Gurion than United Airlines - then the largest airline in the US - had in all of the United States). So I quipped to the taxi driver that it was silly to strike because it wasn't going to accomplish anything (they are supposedly close to an agreement).

He came back at me telling me that the doctors are underpaid and it's 'not fair.' I said that they are underpaid, but that's because all the strings are in the hands of the government. The rest of the way home (fortunately by then we had managed to avoid the morning's major traffic jam) he lectured me on the horrors of the private sector. He claimed that during the years when the Histadrut (our national labor union - think of the AFL-CIO, the teamsters and the mafia all rolled into one) ran the country, no one was forced to work on the Sabbath, because the Histadrut wouldn't allow it except for those privileged characters who wanted to and did so at a 700% (I never realized it was that much) premium! Today, he claims, companies use employment agencies to skirt the law and then exclude Sabbath observers from jobs. I don't have the facts and figures to prove him incorrect, but it seems to me that there are other ways to deal with these types of issues aside from going back to socialism.

Bottom line - our overall tax burden is among the highest in the world, and there is nothing that would help us and our economy more than lowering it.

Labels: housing crisis, Israeli economy, Israeli taxes

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:40 PM