The public suicide attempt in the demonstration marking one year since the start of Israel’s social protest is a watershed for the movement. No longer does the protest express the frustrations of the Tel Aviv “sushi-eaters.” Now it expresses the extreme hardships of the masses, trodden underfoot by the state, driven to their last crust. And behind them are hundreds of thousands who stand on the brink, fearing a fate like that of Moshe Silman.
The following speech was written for Tel Aviv’s most recent social justice protest this past Saturday. While the speech was ultimately not read aloud, it has been translated for +972 with permission from the author, Wafa Tiara.
One after another, in the spirit of the social activists of the beginning of the last century, they stepped up onto the wooden crate on the side of Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard and cried out for a better future.
The struggle to empower Arab women and assist them in obtaining agricultural work did not start last summer, and was not a result of the social protest. This struggle started six years ago, with a special project to open jobs in agriculture for Arab women, with all peripheral benefits and according to the law. Getting wage slips which outline reductions from wages and peripheral benefits may seem to be the absolute minimum, but for many Arab women who are desperate to work this is an achievement. Especially when most farmers prefer to employ imported laborers under even poorer terms.
At first they marched hesitantly, astonished, perhaps even with envy, as they beheld the typical Tel Aviv scene of wide green boulevards, bustling cafes, children in playgrounds, mothers with strollers, young women riding around on bicycles, and the press. It was Friday, October 28, 2011. Over 70 women agricultural workers in long dresses and headscarves marched along Rothschild Boulevard together with the same number of activists from the protest movement in Tel Aviv and the Workers Advice Center (WAC-Maan, hereinafter WAC). They didn’t know what kind of welcome to expect from Tel Aviv. But step by step, their self-confidence grew, and they began responding to the slogans Asma Agbarieh-Zahalka bellowed into the megaphone, at first shyly but later with all their strength: “Work, yes! Unemployment, no!”, “Bibi, resign, you’re not wanted anymore!”, and in Arabic, “Freedom, democracy, social justice!”
