“If Labor doesn’t connect with the tent-city protesters it will lose its
relevance,” party leadership candidate Erel Margalit said on
Saturday.
“In tents across Israel, a new social-economic contract is
being drafted. The people protesting need leadership with a clear social message
and experience in economic matters,” Margalit told an audience at the Ramat Gan
Theater.
Margalit, a businessman investing in cultural projects and head
of Jerusalem Venture Capital, was speaking at the end of a week where he toured
tent sites across the country and met with protesters.
“Our aim was to
hear the views, be with the people, sleep with them in the tents and help them
in phrasing the new social contract. We came to identify with those who fight
for the country’s social and economic identity, to tell them ‘we are with you,
you are our future.’” The tour, under the headline “Let us live in this land,”
took Margalit and a group of writers, social entrepreneurs and businessmen to
Jerusalem, Netanya, Kiryat Shmona, Nahariya, Haifa, Sderot, Beersheba and Tel
Aviv.
