Israel’s middle class call a truce on tax protest backed by 450,000

Organisers of Israel’s biggest rally for economic reform, which attracted more then 450,000 people on Saturday night, have said they will fold their tents but added that social change will continue, driven by weeks of protests.

“People now know their strength, it is something addictive and it cannot be stopped,” Yonatan Levy, one of the leader of Israel’s new social movement, said on Israel Radio. Organisers said more than 450,000 people took part in the protests, maintaining pressure on prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to lower living costs and promote social equality.

Rallies on that scale in Israel, with a population of 7.7 million, have more usually been held over issues of war and peace.

The grassroots protest movement has swollen since July from a cluster of student tent-squatters into a nationwide mobilisation of Israel’s middle class.

Mr Netanyahu’s governing coalition faces no immediate threat, but the protests have underscored the potential electoral impact of hundreds of thousands of voters rallying under a banner of “social justice”.

Many protesters are from the middle class which bears a heavy tax burden and sustains the conscript military.