Canvassing for housing

Die-hard protesters in the capital refuse to strike camp, with the dream of affordable housing still in their sights.

By BARRY DAVIS
The stern family in Gan Ha'ir (photo credit: Barry Stern: The stern family in Gan Ha'ir)
The stern family in Gan Ha'ir
(photo credit: Barry Stern: The stern family in Gan Ha'ir)
The protest tent city and all its current local tributaries started life in Jerusalem in “Horse Park” about a month ago. But while the protesters in the capital and elsewhere around the country have dug their heels in, the world has continued to revolve on its political, regional and routine axis.
These days, any protest is only as effective as the impact it exerts on the general public, and that necessarily means getting substantial slots in the press. The current social unrest initially gained the requisite media coverage, and the prime minister and his cohorts were forced to respond on some level or other.
But last week’s tragic developments in the South and the ensuing missile fire from Gaza on the Negev knocked the tent dwellers off the front page, and there may be a danger of the momentum fizzling out.
Las Vegas-born, 23-year-old Yitzhak Epstein, who made aliya two and a half years ago, says he doesn’t believe the social protest movement is going to go away. “If [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu said to his cabinet or party, ‘We need to get something done, we have people sleeping in tents here, Tel Aviv’s a mess, everybody’s demonstrating, we’ve got to handle the situation, we can’t just push it to one side because we’ve got more important things to do,’ then we would start to make progress with all this.”
Epstein, who spent a couple of weeks camping out at Horse Park, has now relocated to the leafier Gan Ha’ir down the road on King George Avenue.
Fiftysomething Arik Bar, who makes daily visits to the tent dwellers in Gan Ha’ir and helps to keep some of the kids there entertained, shares Epstein’s view.
“There were 300,000 people protesting all over the country,” says Bar. “What you see here is the tip of the iceberg. If Netanyahu really knew what was going on here and in this country – because of financial and social problems, people are getting divorced, children are becoming junkies and alcoholics. This is very big, much bigger than what you see in the tent cities and much bigger than what Netanyahu sees or thinks.”
Bar says the problem goes much deeper than the current camping-out manifestation. “It’s like there are two countries here – there is the State of Israel, the country, and the government and official institutions.
There are all these NGOs trying to help people in unfortunate circumstances, trying to raise donations to help the disadvantaged. Why doesn’t the government do that? It’s ridiculous and criminal.”
Epstein doesn’t think the terrorist attack and rocket fire in the South will have an enduring impact on the social movement. “It was tragic, but in terms of public attention, it was just a distraction. But that’s why we have soldiers, to take out the terrorists. But we live in these tents, in a kind of way like the Beduin and a bit like the hippie movement when everything was free. But there has to be a solution to this, and it doesn’t seem like it’s at the top of the government’s agenda.”
HOWEVER, time may be on Netanyahu’s side. The summer sunshine will eventually turn into cold and rainy weather, and that could make life very uncomfortable for the tent dwellers, especially for families with young children.
Noga Stern can certainly identify with such considerations.
The 41-year-old moved, with her husband and her many offspring, to Horse Park the day after the first tents went up there before crossing the road to Gan Ha’ir just over a week ago. “We were the first family in Horse Park, and the first one here. After we arrived, all sorts of people with kids starting setting up tents. It is much better here for the kids,” she says.
“It is quieter here and calmer.”
Stern has her hands full, with eight children to care for, aged from four months to 14 years. While we chatted, Bar performed acrobatic stunts for the children, while another camper kept the youngsters entertained with Trivial Pursuit quizzes and a variety of manic antics.
The Stern family came from afar to try to bring their plight to the national stage and into the media. “We live in a 54-square meter apartment in Pardess Hanna. Four kids sleep in bunk beds in one room, and four sleep together with my husband and me.”
Stern says that after the family made protracted and repeated applications for help, the authorities eventually offered them larger accommodation in Binyamina. “I rejected that because it would mean moving my kids to new schools, and they would have to find new social circles. That’s cruel for kids, especially as my oldest boy is starting his last year of elementary school. It wouldn’t be fair to him.
We are talking about children here, not objects or robots or soldiers.”
The offer of a larger apartment, says Stern, followed local media coverage of the family’s circumstances.
“There was an article about us in a local Hadera newspaper, about our living conditions in public housing, and the paper invited the housing minister [Ariel Atias] to come and see how we lived, but he declined.
So my husband and I decided to do something about it ourselves.”
The Sterns have been campaigning for quite some time and only obtained their current cramped apartment after setting up camp next to the Pardess Hanna Council building in 2008. “I was pregnant with my seventh child at the time,” Stern recalls. “We had lots of trouble there, with the police and all sorts of threats. What we’re doing here in Jerusalem is a continuation of our struggle to get suitable housing for the family. We realized after a while that head of the Pardess Hanna Council was not going to help us. He’s not sympathetic to our situation.”
Stern is, of course, fully aware that September 1 – the first day back at school – is looming large on the horizon but says that she and her husband are not going to abandon their fight without getting an appropriate solution for their predicament.
“If I have to, I’ll register my children with schools and kindergartens here in Jerusalem,” she declares.
“We will not budge from here before everything is settled to our satisfaction.”
Besides her personal woes, Stern says that camping out in the center of Jerusalem with the other protesters has given her a boost. “As a nation, we always followed like sheep. I was never involved in any protest before this. The government always did as it pleased and tore the country apart with all sorts of talk about the Left and the Right. But this is not about politics, this is a cry for help that comes straight from the heart. We are all together in this. That is wonderful.”
Meanwhile, Bar considers the political implications of the social unrest. “If you have 300,000 people protesting about something, that could get you 11 MKs in an election,” he muses. “If that happened, things really would start to change. Then we would have power from within.”
Twentysomething Ya’acov from the Na Lashevet theater group – a company of physically disabled actors and writers – fully identifies with Stern’s observations about sharing quality time and a common goal. “This protest has brought people together which, if you think about it, is amazing in Israeli in this day and age when everyone has TVs, e-mail, cell phones,” he said as he started getting the props ready for the group’s performance at Horse Park on Sunday.
“We all get together and talk about things, about personal and social issues, and listen to each other.
Just spending time together is a wonderful experience.
You have the government on the one side, and on the other side we are here together sharing our time.” 
Ya’acov also believes that the protest will continue to gather momentum. “I was on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv a few days ago, and a doubledecker bus with a whole load of kids celebrating a bat mitzva drove by the tents, and the kids started chanting the protest slogan ‘The people demand social justice.’ Then a big group of joggers ran past and also chanted the slogan. Make no mistake, this is spreading,” he says.
“It’s not just us who are suffering,” says Stern. “The doctors, teachers, parents and children are all suffering.
You can’t just walk all over people the way the government has been doing. And what about Gilad Schalit? What is the government doing about that? I have eight children and, thank God, they are all here with me. But I have six sons. How can I possibly comfort Gilad Schalit’s mother? That’s very painful.”
Stern says the nature of the protest is something special. “It is a peaceful protest with no violence, with intelligent people running it and participating in it. Look at all the violence in London and around us in the Arab world. Here, we are joyful that the people have woken up and are unified. I believe we will win in the end.”