The New York Times most foolish story on Israel....

Protesting is just a regular normal activity in Israel...

It is an old cliché that for journalists history is what happened the day before yesterday. Ancient history is what happened last week. No better example of this axiom can be found than in today’s New York Times story about various protests going on in Israel. The conceit of Ethan Bronner’s feature is that the wave of protest movements that spread across the Arab world this year has had some influence on the Jewish state. According to Bronner, Israelis have been inspired by their counterparts in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria to demonstrate against their government’s economic policies.

The foolishness and sheer ignorance of the country’s history of protest movements is staggering. Not only is there no analogy or even the faintest connection between Arab efforts to overthrow authoritarian tyrants, the idea Israelis needed Arab inspiration to generate protests against the government of the day is simply absurd.

Anyone who has spent even a small amount of time in Israel can tell you that street demonstrations, protest tents or movements based on dissatisfaction with the status quo is not only not an innovation, it is a staple of the country’s political culture. I can say from personal experience that in my visits to the Knesset or the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem during the past decades, I am hard pressed to remember a time when there weren’t protests of some sort going on. If it wasn’t Ethiopian immigrants wanting the government to bring their relatives left behind to Israel, it was the families of prisoners of war, victims of terror, the elderly or the poor.