The My Israel NGO rescinded its plan to join Saturday night’s mass housing protest, saying the demonstration’s organizers did not respond to a request to sing Hatikva.
My Israel offered on Friday to join the protest, on condition that the national anthem would be sung. However, on Saturday night, it announced that housing protest leader “Daphni Leef’s people evaded and evaded” committing to singing Hatikva at the event in Tel Aviv.
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However, the “minimum requirement for joining should be obvious. The protest’s purpose and participants should be Israeli, and its organizers should not stop demonstrators from singing Hatikva, as they did last week,” Shaked said.
“We will find another way to help Israel society,” she said.
My Israel wrote on its website and Facebook page: “We are aware and
identify with the problem in Israel: It is too expensive here because of
monopolies and lack of competition...
tycoons prevent companies from competing. We are willing to fight that.
“We are not willing to join a protest that aims for anarchy and
pointlessly harming the government ‘because Bibi [Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu] is bad’ and that is lead by anti-IDF and anti-Israel
elements. We would be happy to work side by side with leftwing Zionists
who support the State of Israel, but think territory should be given
up. They are our brothers, even if we disagree with them,” My Israel
explained.
A number of left-wing Zionist organizations, such as The National Left, participated in Saturday’s demonstration.
My Israel wrote that the activists involved in the housing protest “do not want Israel to be a Jewish state.”
On Friday, Ma’ariv columnist Kalman Liebskind listed various leaders of
the housing protest and their associations with left-wing organizations
and parties, such as Leef, a film editor for the New Israel Fund,
Yehudit Ilani of the Balad Party, and Alon Lee Green of the Hadash
Party.
Late Friday night, Peace Now director Yariv Oppenheimer wrote on his
Facebook page that 20 right-wing activists surrounded him at his protest
tent, spat on him and yelled: “Hang the traitors!”