The protests against high housing prices and the cost of living in Israel are completely justified. But it turns out that the people now organizing and funding the protests, in contrast to those who started them, are extreme left-wingers who snatched up the movement with the enthusiasm of someone discovering a treasure. They are taking advantage of the protests to advance a political agenda that, in every recent election, was backed by only a small minority of voters. The paradox is that the Left's success in carrying out its policies is not an insignificant factor in creating the unreasonably high cost of living that the demonstrators are coming out against today. In the not-so-distant past, when Ariel Sharon expelled thousands of families from their homes in Gush Katif and northern Samaria, he and his cronies promised the people of Israel that the disengagement would cost 5 billion shekels, reimbursed by the U.S. government. This, of course, was just a smokescreen of lies created to stave off criticism. The real price of the disengagement was several times higher, and we didn't get a single cent from the United States. What we did get was a deterioration in our security situation. Because of our flight from the Gaza Strip, we needed to dramatically increase the number of land, sea and air patrols, which swelled the defense budget. We also had to acquire more military equipment, such as the astronomically expensive Iron Dome batteries. The direct and indirect costs of military operations such as Cast Lead must also be added to that tally. It is the middle class who carries most of the burden for this funding, now and in the future. Tens of billions -- if not hundreds of billions -- of shekels have been spent to date, all to carry out a left-wing policy rejected by the majority of the nation in the voting booth but nevertheless embraced by Ariel Sharon. The expense has been paid by future generations. In other words, at the expense of today's young people. It is quite possible that if we had never had to shoulder such an enormous military budget, there would be no reason to go out and demonstrate today. The current Israeli government also failed when two years ago, it froze building in Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem. Thousands of young people live in those areas, many of whom have started new families. Because there were no apartments available in those areas for their burgeoning families, they were forced to look west, toward the Jewish communities on the other side of the Green Line. This created demand for thousands of units, increasing pressure on the housing market, pushing up prices both for sale and for rent in the Dan region. The economic cost of the building freeze is exactly what the tent protesters along Rothschild Boulevard are fighting. The economic price of this policy is felt every month in the deficit of every middle class family, making it hard for them to pay their bills. The money spent on "investment in the settlements," to use the words of the Left, is negligible compared to what the residents of the settlements would cost the state were they living within pre-1967 borders. Activists on the Left hide behind the legitimate protesters, co-opting their movement to fulfill their own dream: the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the West Bank and Jerusalem. If they succeed, heaven forbid, whatever is left of the sparse savings of the middle class and their children will be confiscated for further expulsions and other security matters. It will cost billions of shekels to defend a population crammed into pre-1967 borders. The tent protesters don't want to see that scenario unfold, but it inevitably will if they continue to allow the Left to hitchhike on their movement.
