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Showing posts from October, 2011

Deja Vu on Liberty Square

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A visit to Zuccotti Park, the epicentre of the Occupy Wall Street movement, triggered a sharp sense of deja vu. We'd flown in from Israel where the last vestiges of the protest tent encampments were being removed, only to find that they had been reincarnated a spit away from Wall Street. And what was fuelling the protestors here among the sleeping bags and placards  was the same middle class anger with big business, with bad government, with the disproportionate distribution of wealth, in short: with the system. There was also the same infuriating/intriguing refusal to be tied down to fixed set of demands. References to the fundamentals of American democracy were a major motif. One man stood reading the Constitution out loud. I copied the following passage from the New York Times Review (but forgot to jot down the name of the author): Sounds familiar? It would be hard to beat this as a description of the Daphni Leef  school  of the Israeli social protest movement, down to Dap