Fold up the tents

Local taxpayers will have to cover hefty rehabilitation costs following this summer's social protests.

By JPOST EDITORIAL
Tent city protests (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
Tent city protests
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
The High Court of Justice is due to consider a petition today against the evacuation of Tel Aviv’s three tentencampments – precursors and models for dozens of others that had sprung up countrywide during the summer. The Tel Aviv District Court earlier this week underscored the right of the municipality to remove them, saying they had become a health hazard and had descended into anarchy.
In truth, even at the height of the summer protests, few tents were ever genuinely occupied and slept-in. They were never legal, yet they were tolerated as few such demonstrative exercises are likely to be.
To be sure, the tent protest is by no means an innovative 2011 concept.
The country, for example, was awash with tents in the summer of 1990 to back demands for affordable housing. They were pitched in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Ramat Gan, Holon, Rishon Lezion, Ramat Hasharon, Bat Yam, Ashdod, Beersheba and elsewhere.
In 2002, an encampment dubbed Kikar Halehem (which means both Bread Square and “a loaf of bread” in Hebrew) was set up in Tel Aviv’s posh Kikar Hamedina. It was forcefully dismantled following lengthy legal showdowns. However, after the High Court ordered it taken down in 2003, the encampment relocated to the government compound in Jerusalem. Those tents were only removed in December 2004 – again after protracted litigation and High Court intervention.
In a groundbreaking decision, Supreme Court Justices Ayala Procaccia, Miriam Naor and Elyakim Rubinstein established what they described as “the limits of protest.” Among the non-starters was “unilaterally usurping land from the public and causing damage to public property for which taxpayers would eventually be compelled to foot the bills.”
And so wrote Procaccia on behalf of the entire panel on December 6, 2004: “The freedoms of expression and protest are indeed paramount, but they do not entitle citizens to do as they wish in the public domain and cause significant and ongoing harm to vital public interests. The right to protest does not mean the absence of all discipline and unbridled anarchy... No matter how important the aims of any given protest, no group may appropriate a city street for extended unlimited periods and position tents and facilities there, while impeding free movement and creating sanitation problems and aesthetic eyesores.”
These words could have been written today and in fact theoretically still apply as a binding precedent. Nonetheless, current tent-protest promoters seek to prevent Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai from removing the tents from Rothschild and Nordau Boulevards and from Levinsky Street.
The initial district court ruling was no surprise. The judge had to state the obvious. There’s no way the law can countenance a patently unlawful action. Media/political support and popularity do not endow the encampments with legal immunity. Indeed, the court stressed that “Tel Aviv was exceedingly lenient thus far despite foul smells, use of private yards as public toilets, pirate connections to electricity and water mains, strident noise, rampant druguse and damage to the decades-old boulevard flora.”
It was only a matter of time before Huldai was forced to act – foremost by taxpaying residents on the very streets commandeered by the protesters.
To date, Tel Aviv’s damages alone are estimated at more than NIS 3 million in extra sanitary services and another NIS 1.5m. just for repairing the injury to the Rothschild Boulevard trees and infrastructure. There’s no telling who’ll pay for the utilities tapped into illicitly.
It all began in Tel Aviv, but it’s not the only city left holding the bills. Haifa’s preliminary assessments are that its far smaller protest will cost at least NIS 1.5m. to replace vandalized park facilities, sprinkler equipment, playground paraphernalia and benches, to say nothing of reviving ruined lawns and public gardens.
Jerusalem hasn’t yet evaluated the extent of the damage but notes that “lawns had dried up and parks will have to be rehabilitated at some considerable expense.”
Holon estimates it’ll have to come up with at least NIS 1m. to pay for sanitation, garbage collection, electricity, water, new sidewalk railings, etc.
All these hefty expenditures will inevitably be passed on to local taxpayers. The irony is that the overwhelming majority of them belong to the very middle class in whose name the protests were purportedly mounted.