“If 430,000 people, 7% of the population, had taken to the streets in any other part of the world demanding social justice, fairer rents and a lower cost of living, every placard would have been poured over for signs that the long-awaited revolution had at last arrived. But because those people are Israelis, the protest has been treated as a summer season curio. It should not be. Every one of those protesters deserve credit for building a serious popular movement which did not riot, but which questioned the values of the hypercapitalist age in which we all, to some extent, collaborate. Daphni Leef, one of the organisers of the original tent protest, deserves particular praise. Not just for a speech in which she looks at democracy straight in the eye (“not a collection of lonely individuals who each sit in front of one box, the TV, and once every four years put a slip in another box – the polling urn”) but for the inclusion, too, of those who are at the bottom of the pile in every sense of the word – the Bedouin. The discrimination suffered by Israeli-Arabs who make up one-fifth of the population is the elephant in the room of any debate on social justice. This is a universal not a sectarian demand and once launched on its path, is difficult to stop at any barrier. Few would have predicted that a tent protest would end up in the sort of scenes we saw on the streets last Saturday. Leef addressed not just the inequality of Israeli society, but the inequalities inherent in it. Long may that line of thought continue.”

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