I’m slowly moving my old WordPress blog over here [to static blog], by cutting and pasting the source code. A good programmer could easily make a script to do this, which would probably take even longer since I don’t have very many posts. And I’m slowly captioning my photos from India this summer. Maybe I’ll eventually create a post, based on photos and emails.
While I was in India, a whole protest movement was born in Israel, which led up to last night’s demonstrations of some 450,000. We attended the biggest of these, which was in Tel Aviv. After a long search for parking, we arrived around 10:15 to the main demonstration site, which was still full although getting there meant cutting through a tide of people who were already leaving. The main slogan of the demonstration and the movement has been “social justice”. People seem finally to be getting fed up with the increasingly capitalistic trends of recent decades, the withering of the welfare state and the growing gap between rich and poor. The Occupation is not being talked about, but Arabs and Bedouin were mentioned in the speeches in the context of neglected weak population groups requiring care. The avoidance of speaking about issues that are central to the Israeli reality (because they would be divisive) makes me feel ambivalent about the movement as a whole. Dorit thinks that heightening awareness to one set of social ills will lead to a broader awareness that will eventually bring about a change with regard to the Occupation. I think that this may be trying to treat the symptoms rather than the root causes. But we’ll see how it develops.