Tel Aviv tent protests wind down

September 19, 2011 - 7:33 AM by David

Tel activists dismantling a tent site earlier this month (Getty Images)

The tent protests which occupied our minds and hearts throughout the summer in Israel have received their final notice.

On Sunday a Tel Aviv district court judge ordered the remaining tent dwellers to dismantle their campsite on the city’s Rothschild Boulevard by Wednesday, extended an interim order prohibiting the municipality from dismantling the tents, to allow the tent protesters to do so themselves. The issue went to court when the municipality and the protesters couldn’t reach a compromise on enabling the tent sites to stay up through the upcoming High Holidays.

However Tel Aviv officials said the tents in Jaffa and the Hatikva neighborhoods (where some of the protesters are actually homeless or living in dismal conditions) could stay, but not on Rothschild Boulevard, Ben-Gurion Boulevard, Nordau Boulevard and Levinsky Park, where the protests have been largely symbolic.

Following the huge end of summer rally in Tel Aviv which capped the summer-long protest, the leaders of the movement decided to change tactics, awaiting the conclusions and recommendations of the Trajtenberg Committee on socioeconomic change set up by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu sometime in the next few weeks.
Whether the spirit and hopes galvanized by the summer protests will be cause for real change in the country remain to be seen, but Israelis have every right to be proud of the movement, and of the privilege of living in a country which enabled free protest and exchange of thought in the most civil of manners.

Goodbye tents, we will miss you.

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