ISRAEL: Expenses Force New Settlements of Sorts

• by Jillian Kestler-D’Amours (jerusalem)
• Saturday, August 06, 2011
• Inter Press Service

'We were evicted from rented houses because we can’t pay the rent,' explained Maya Zigov, a single mother of four children who has been living in a tent in Jerusalem’s Independence Park for nearly two weeks, alongside a growing number of other families.

A member of Israel’s historically under-privileged Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) community, Zigov said that the Israeli government no longer provides her with mortgage subsidies or benefits as a single parent. She had no option, she said, but to join the tent protests in an effort to regain her rights.

'Today I work. I get 2000-2500 shekels (580-730 dollars) per month and this isn’t enough for anything. Today you pay 3,200 shekels (930 dollars) for a three-room apartment. You need to feed four children, you need to give them the minimum, the slice of bread in the morning, a schoolbag, school supplies,' Zigov said.

'There are people like us, many hundreds. Let them come. Let them not be ashamed. We are fighting for everyone,' she added.

Protests against the high cost of housing began in mid-July when a group of young Israelis set up tents in central Tel Aviv. Largely led by middle-class Jewish-Israelis, nearly a dozen tent cities have been erected throughout the country since then, and thousands of demonstrators — including single parents, young families, and students — have taken to the streets.

But the Israeli housing crisis didn’t appear overnight. According to research conducted by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), the Israeli Housing Ministry’s budget has been cut significantly in the past decade, from 4.5 percent of the national budget in 1999 to only 1.6 percent in 2008. Budgets also fell for government assistance to apartment and house buyers, and the amount of public housing available has dropped while very few new units have been built.

At the same time, it has been reported that 75 percent of Israeli workers make no more than 6,000 shekels per month (1,700 dollars), the Israeli middle class is shrinking and income disparity between the rich and poor is growing. In fact, data collected by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) found that Israel has the third largest level of income inequality among OECD countries, behind only Mexico and the United States.

According to Israeli economist Shir Hever, these economic issues — and the housing bubble in particular — have been brewing for years as a result of various factors, including major government spending on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and demographic planning aimed at taking land from Palestinian citizens of the state.

'Many small communities were set up to create ‘facts on the ground’ in the Naqab (Negev) and the Galilee, but these communities have no economic justification and are plagued by unemployment, poverty and crime,' Hever told IPS in an e-mail interview.

'This creates a strong pressure on young people to move to the ‘centre’ (Tel Aviv and its immediate surroundings), which is the only place one can find a job, a cosmopolitan culture and high-level education. Families will pay almost any price to be able to live in the centre, because the alternative is to live in the underdeveloped periphery.'

On Tuesday Jul. 26, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to quell the growing unrest by announcing that he would build 50,000 affordable housing units within the next two years — primarily for students, young couples, large families, and former soldiers — and another 10,000 dormitory units for students.

Demonstrators quickly rejected Netanyahu’s proposal, however, as not meeting their demand for real reforms across all sectors of Israeli society.

'The government has yet to espouse the central message: this is not a struggle of one sector or another, but a broad social struggle. Affordable housing is a universal right and it is the State’s responsibility to ensure that every person is able to realise this right,' said Israeli attorney Gil Gan-Mor, coordinator of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel’s (ACRI) Right to Housing Project, in a statement released shortly after Netanyahu unveiled his plan.

Despite the assertion that a broad social movement is forming, the protests have been criticised for ignoring the systematic inequalities endured by Palestinian citizens of Israel — their inability to get building permits for their homes or own land, for instance — and for not broaching the topic of the Israeli occupation.

Recent examples point to the possibility that the movement could spread to Palestinian communities in Israel, however, as Palestinians in Jaffa and in the northern town of Baqa al-Gharbiyye recently built tent cities of their own, and Palestinian Bedouins from the 'unrecognised' village of al-Araqib — which has been demolished by the Israeli authorities nearly 30 times in the past year — joined the tent city in Beer Sheva.

Ultimately, according to economist Shir Hever, the protestors must address the discrimination and inequalities at the core of Israeli society if they are to create lasting change.

'Israel’s inequalities are deeply embedded in the discrimination of minorities, which has a tendency to spread from the marginalisation of one group — the Palestinians — to others: women, ultra-Orthodox religious, Mizrahi Jews, new immigrants. Only a social protest that is founded on incorporation rather than inclusion of all of these minorities has a chance to achieve sustainable social change,' Hever said.

'There are certainly signs of these minority groups joining the protest and taking part, but so far the protesters shouting slogans of social justice are taking care not to discuss the ethnic inequalities as the base of the Israeli system, for fear of causing internal divisions among the protestors.'

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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