Tonight there were much more than 150 thousand demonstrating in Tel Aviv alone. If Tel Aviv has a population of about half a million, and over 150 thousand people were holding flags in the center of the city and shouting in union “democracy,” what does this mean? This is not just about certain rules being crammed down our necks every day, or about politicians who should be in jail. This is about the concept of democracy, and to my mind it should not be only an Israeli issue or even just an issue for Jews around the world. It is about the danger to democracy all over the world. My Hungarian friends, my Polish friends, my Italian friends, and my American friends all know the terrible threats to democracy being faced and the delicate freedom to protest that can disappear in a moment. Tell the world to pay attention to the freedom we have and guard it carefully!
There are many important issues that depend on democracy that we have, admittedly, paid insufficient attention to and there are hundreds of songs, plays, movies, that attest the awareness of inequality in our society, but it is only now that individuals have been galvanized at the thought that the government has been turning these inequalities into law. The Declaration of Independence of 1948 ensured democracy for all, but it was never given the status of a constitution, and the thought was that the constitution would be created on this basis. But in the absence of a constitution, any idea can be altered, and the promised racial and gender equality easily eroded.
We post the Declaration of Independence everywhere, to remind us of what we were fighting for from the beginning, and what we have forgotten. We have a lot of promises to keep, and we want to be able to keep them.