I well remember Britain’s winter of discontent quite a long way back in time now in 1978. My most vivid memory is of seeing a ‘Green Goddess’  fire engine arriving at a blaze in a block of apartments only 100 metres from our house. The sight of 1940’s fire fighting equipment operated by the army was astonishing, but came as a result of the fire service having gone on strike together with nearly all other public sector workers in protest at having their annual pay rise capped at 5%. Oh to get a 5% pay rise these days; that would be very special indeed.  


Memories of rubbish piling up in the streets, doctors and nurses  on short-time, fire fighters, gravediggers and lorry drivers all downing tools, have all come flooding back during the last week as Israel appears to have set out on its own modern version of the old theme. A long-running dispute between Israeli doctors and the government appears to have come to a head with doctors now going on strike at the ridiculously low levels of pay they receive from the government. 

 
For a country whose health service and general standards of medical care are, in my opinion, far in advance of most treatment I and my family received during our time in the UK, it is with real sadness that I see such disillusionment and lowering of standards because of a squeeze on health service budgets. But how can this be when Israel is supposedly in the midst of an economic miracle? We’re one of the few countries in the world who have enjoyed relative boom times whilst most other nations teetered on the brink of collapse, and we’re likely to be ‘rolling in it’ over the next 20 years as the massive gas and oil resources found offshore last year start to be piped in and sold at a huge profit.

 
So how can it be that a significant percentage of doctors after many years of training and more years in practice, reportedly take home no more that 8000 shekels a month after tax – that’s around $2,500 or £1,500 per month– in a country where the cost of living is higher than the UK, far higher than nearly all parts of America or most other countries for that matter? Where is all the money going? Who is in charge of the health service?

 
Just a minute! No-one wanted the Health Ministry portfolio (because they can’t massage the budget to appease political allies and constituents) and so, despite Israel's present cabinet having the largest number of ministers in its history – 30 – it was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who added that portfolio to his collection that also includes being Minister for Pensions, and Minister for Economic Strategy. Just a minute! That means that he’s in charge of overseeing the deals with the oil and gas companies who have found the second biggest fields in the world and are going to make us all rich. Of course, that is unless you are a doctor or a nurse, or a pensioner.

 
Something stinks! Doctors are demonstrating and calling spontaneous strikes at hospitals around the country and now the leader of Israel’s Medical Association, Leonid Eidelman, is to begin a hunger strike which he intends to continue until a wage deal that is acceptable to his members is reached. How sad that Netanyahu has allowed this dispute, (lasting some 128 days at the time of writing), to go on for so long. I venture to suggest that he would have been much quicker to put his hand in the treasury‘s pocket and find the funds needed if the protestors had been ultra-Orthodox Haredis, the people whose support he relies on most to shore up his tottering coalition.

 
Talking of the religious sector, today’s news reports of ultra-Orthodox protestors joining the secular youth demonstrating across the country at the lack of affordable housing in their protest outside the PM’s office in Jerusalem, was a very welcome and very rare sign of cross-religious/cross-political support for a situation which I have highlighted a number of times over the last year, namely the massive rise in house prices which bears no resemblance to the amount most ordinary Israelis can afford in mortgage repayments.

 
Protests started last week as a tented city emerged overnight on Rothschild Boulevard in central Tel Aviv, with similar sit-in’s springing up almost immediately in other towns such as Haifa and Be’er Sheba, before the Jerusalem village appeared on the scene earlier today. There was also a rally in central Tel Aviv at the weekend that attracted more than 20,000
supporters, according to media reports. 

 
Although the secular youth and ultra-Orthodox communities have arrived at the protests from very different angles – the secular camp from the point of view of working people whose wages fail to give them any hope of ever buying even a modest property, whilst the religious protestors find their situation worsening rapidly due to the majority of families having no wage earner (as they prefer to study in religious institutions whilst producing as many as 14 children a family) – the fact remains that these two very disparate worlds have seemingly found a common cause.

 
I would suggest to those secular youth (for whom I and many, many other Israelis have tremendous sympathy), who feel uneasy at the presence of the ultra-Orthodox suddenly emerging in their corner, that strange as it might seem, their presence is more likely to bring about a change than any number of non-religious, centre/centre-left modern youth demonstrating en masse, because the religious lobby is many times stronger than that of Israel’s secular society. If the ultra-religious rabbis join the cause for affordable housing and mobilise at the drop of a ‘black hat’ tens of thousands of black and white bedecked supporters, Netanyahu, fearful of danger to his coalition, will reach for the cheque book or push a bill through Knesset faster than you could dance a hora at a Jewish wedding.

 
The sad truth is that when it comes to political power in Israel nowadays, it is the religious right who hold all the aces, not the secular, taxpaying, centre, modern orthodox, or the left wing.


 
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Originating as I do from a country where freedom of speech is paramount and where a whole gamut of opinions are tolerated no matter howextreme they might be as long as they remain with the constraints of the law, it goes very much against the grain to witness recent moves in Israel’s Knesset  that appear to signal a shift towards a battening down of the right to express opinions in what, until now, has been the only truly functioning democracy in the Middle East.  


Israel was created in 1948 as a state that allowed a wide variety of views to be expressed by people coming from disparate parts of the world and from many different cultures and backgrounds. Despite a rocky road over the last 63 years those original pillars of this democracy have stood firm, but now, with the introduction of the Boycott Law and the proposed investigations into the funding of perceived left-wing NGO’s, the government has set this country on the descent of a slippery slope that could lead to the slimming down of the opportunities to democratically express an opinion that isn’t shared by the right-wing parliamentary majority.

 
And why are these two moves occurring at this particular time? Well, I sense a kind of siege mentality creeping into the current politics of the Israeli government as they gird themselves for a potential UN vote on whether or not to officially recognise a Palestinian state. Over the last few months the Israeli government has sent out envoys across the globe to seek to persuade governments at all points of the compass to think very carefully before officially recognising a state that is partially governed by an entity (Hamas) that does not recognise the legitimacy of its neighbour, Israel, and wishes to have it removed from the map at the cost of potentially millions of lives. 
 
 
The recognition of the Palestinians at this stage, whilst they still receive massive amounts of financial and military support from Iran and other rogue nations in the region, would be a very dangerous precedent for the
world to set. Such is the strength though of the Arab block vote and the fears amongst many other nations, (including those in Europe), that their local Muslim/Arab communities might react angrily to a rejection of a Palestinian state, that many people see the declaration (in some form) as almost inevitable, even allowing for the opposition of the US, Canada, and a number of other significant western European nations.

 
Against this background an aggressive and provocative mentality has suddenly pervaded the Israeli right, the dominant force in local politics, and they have rushed through a law making it illegal for anyone to boycott Israeli products or organizations. Already centre and left-wing groups have petitioned the High Court to have the law, (introduced by right-wing MK’s from the Israel Beitenu Russian immigrant party and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Likud party), declared illegal. The petition to the High Court states that the law prevents “the open, productive political dialogue that constitutes the basis for the existence of democracy,” and I agree whole-heartedly with the wording of the petition. 

 
Already Israel’s Attorney General, Yehuda Weinstein is under massive pressure to write off the law before it can cause any damage and is reported to be frantically weighing up his role as the enforcer of the government on legal matters and his conscience as a free-thinking individual. Doubtless, behind the scenes Weinstein is coming under massive pressure from the hard right-wing elements of the government.

 
If the law stands then the right to protest against the West Bank settlements and other Israeli policies will become a very grey area, (to be fair it won’t even be grey, it WILL be illegal), and what has until now been legitimate democratic protest could become a crime of subversion of the state. It all sounds like a step back to the dictatorial policies of 1950’s Communist eastern bloc states, and this in one of the most free-thinking, progressive capitalist economies on the globe.  Add to this the establishment of a parliamentary enquiry into left-wing NGO’s (note only left-wing, not right-wing), and you may begin to understand the fears and   concerns of those in the centre and to the left of the Israeli political   spectrum that something nasty and wholly distasteful is taking root in our   midst.



Israel’s greatest strength and what has set it apart from the overwhelmingly majority of countries in the region, has been its western-style democracy and the values that respect the rights of people of all political and ethnic backgrounds – there are communist Arab MK’s in the Knesset and equal voting rights for Jews and Arabs – freedom of expression, equal rights for women, gays, the disabled, and many more minority groups. 

 
Recently a campaign to boycott Israeli-produced cottage cheese was launched by a local lady on Facebook after she lost her patience with the ridiculous rise in the price of her favourite cheese of over 50% in the last year. Her campaign received more than 20,000 followers in the first couple of days and spread like wildfire to the mainstream media. A week later, after a significant number of people joined the boycott, the companies producing Israel’s favourite cheese caved in to democratic protest and significantly reduced the price. When I went shopping last week I noticed the price of the cheese was now 4.90 sheqels having been 7.20 a week or two earlier. This is democracy in action, a wondrous thing. Were she to have raised the issue after the introduction of the new Boycott Law, the lady who began the Facebook campaign could well have faced a term in
jail!



I truly hope common sense will prevail, that the High Court, an independent judiciary, will throw out the Boycott Law and declare it illegal, that the investigation into funding of left-wing NGO’s will be stopped, or, to be even-handed, be extended to cover all NGO’s including those on the right, and that a modicum of good sense will return to an ever more alarming and thoroughly disheartening Israeli political scene.

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