Municipality clears out protest encampment on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild
A protest encampment set up on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv was cleared out Sunday morning less than a week after it was set up as a continuation of sorts of the Summer 2011 housing protests. The man who launched the demonstration, Shay Cohen, said Sunday he and his associates would look for other protest efforts in the coming days and that he believes other protest camps could start sprouting up in other cities beginning Monday. “Our message was heard in the media and on social networks and helped get the issues that really matter to the public back into the discussion,” Cohen told The Jerusalem Post Sunday afternoon. Like the 2011 protests, the week-long protest on Rothschild began with a Facebook post. About two weeks ago, Cohen, one of the founders and leaders of the organization “Koach L’Ovdim” called on supporters to pitch tents in a show of protest against the high cost of housing in Israel. That may be where the similarities end though. While the 2011 demonstrations swept the country and brought hundreds of thousands of people to protests in cities across Israel, at most there were only about two dozen tents at the camp launched by Cohen, and the protest only remained in the news cycle for around 24 hours. The Tel Aviv municipality said Sunday that it had informed the protesters last week that by Wednesday it would begin removing the tents. It added that those who received permission to set up the encampment last week had left by Friday and just a few late arrivals had remained when the evacuation was completed on Sunday