Thursday, June 16, 2011

I love this country

The biggest news story in Israel over the last few days has been- I kid you not- the high price of cottage cheese. I have yet to make up my mind whether this is a Good Thing (maybe we really don't have anything else to worry about?) or a Bad Thing (are we whistlin' past the cemetery?).

Or maybe Israelis just really like their dairy products.

As to the issue itself, I don't even like cottage cheese (the word is the same in Hebrew, by the way), so I'd be pretty disappointed if, say, the government fell over this. (Hey, governments have fallen for a lot less- and stayed in power despite a lot more.)

3 comments:

df said...

I noticed that on a hebrew web site. I really thought something was weird - why on earth were they talking about cottage cheese? Thought I must be misunderstanding something and moved on. But I guess that's what it was!

Nachum said...

Oh, it is. They're having heated debates on this in the Knesset. There's a massive boycott campaign underway on Facebook. (To be fair, it seems to tie into the question of dairy monopolies and price supports. But mostly, cottage cheese.)

The newspapers are joking that the rest of the Middle East is in an uprising over freedom and democracy, and Israel wants cheaper cottage cheese.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps now, just a month later that 300,000 Israelis have taken to the streets, folks will look back in retrospect and realize that it wasn't about the cottage cheese per se but rather the overall social injustice and huge par between Israel's rich and poor. Just remember what happened to the last politician who shrugged off the hungry masses when she declared, "Let them eat cake".