“It started in June with a Facebook campaign against overpriced cottage cheese, an Israeli breakfast staple. Then demonstrators put up a tent city in Tel Aviv in protest at the shortage of affordable housing. By last Saturday 250,000 Israelis were on the nation’s streets, demanding an end to economic inequality and social injustice.

It is tempting to draw a parallel with the Arab spring protests that began with a vegetable vendor in Tunisia and brought hundreds of thousands of Egyptians on to Cairo’s Tahrir Square. But such a comparison is misleading. True, a perception that too many people cannot make ends meet, or even live in outright poverty, motivates Israelis as it did Tunisians and Egyptians in January and February. But Israel is a democracy; the anciens régimes in Tunis and Cairo were autocracies. Political corruption is not unknown in Israel, but the government is not a kleptocracy. Israelis are not trying to overthrow their state.”

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