About two weeks after the social protests erupted in July 2011, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a special news conference to present a comprehensive plan to resolve the housing crisis. At the time, the protest movement was spreading throughout the country like wildfire in a field of thorns. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, calling for “social justice.” Netanyahu felt, and rightly so, that he could lose control over the unfolding events.
At first, Netanyahu and other senior Likud Party officials tried to argue that left-wing anarchist groups were behind the protests, and that the protests were politically motivated. But these claims sounded increasingly out of touch as the protest movement grew, bringing almost all of the Israeli middle class, including Likud voters, out into the streets.
