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Israeli citizens have poured into the streets of several major cities to demonstrate against worsening economic and social inequalities, price hikes and reduced living standards.

Prior to this latest street protest, thousands of people gathered in and around Tel Aviv’s Habima Square on June 23 with some 85 reportedly arrested. Protesters were shouting, The nation is after social justice and democracy and chanted slogans against Tel Aviv’s Mayor Ron Huldai and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Press TV has conducted an interview with author of the Hidden History of Zionism, Ralph Schoenman from Berkeley to further discuss the issue.

The program also provides opinions of two additional guests: writer and radio host, Stephen Lendman from Chicago and Mofeed Jaber with the Center for ME Studies and Public Relations. The following is a rough transcript of the interview.

Press TV: What is your take on all of this? We have heard different perspectives, but is it that Israel has set up an elitist society and that the benefits are just going to a certain percentage of the masses or how do you see the problems that they are facing right now from economic perspective?

Schoenman: Well, in the first place we have to understand the parasitic nature of the Zionist state, which is essentially an extension of the US imperialism and its shock troops subsidized and sustained in that way for a very long period of time, a hundred billion dollars in just the last forty years and that is just the official aid number.

The numbers in reality are far greater than that because these so-called loans are never called in and the banking structure with respect to the Zionist State utilizes Israeli-controlled banks at far lower interest rates for the funds of the major states such as California.

So the Israeli state is an apparatus designed by imperialism to function as its shock troops in the region. Within that context of course as you have been describing, the structure of power in Israel is a parot or image of the nature of the corporate capitalism in the stage of terminal decay.

There is a huge concentration of power in the hands of a tiny oligarchy, largely tied to the profiteering from military production for the imperia, but for the most part, the privileged in Israel are increasingly shrinking to a handful.

According to the report in Agence France Presse today, the demands of the protesters in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and Haifa focused on not only what you quoted, “the only solution to privatization is revolution”, but power from this money is an underworld.

Originally posted here:

'Israelis revolt against apartheid Zionism'?