Right-wing NGO: Protesters refuse to sing ‘Hatikva’

My Israel offered on Friday to join the protest, on condition that the national anthem would be sung.

By LAHAV HARKOV
Tent city 311 (photo credit: Ben Hartman)
Tent city 311
(photo credit: Ben Hartman)
The My Israel NGO rescinded its plan to join Saturday night’s mass housing protest, saying the demonstration’s organizers did not respond to a request to sing Hatikva.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.
RELATED:Hundreds of thousands in ‘social justice’ ralliesParents march in TA to protest rising cost of raising kids
“This should be a protest for all Israeli organizations, Left and Right, because centralization and monopolies do not know the difference between right and left wing,” My Israel chairwoman Ayelet Shaked said. “Therefore, we decided [on Friday] to join the struggle.”
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!”