Admittedly they’ve been at it for a few months longer than Occupy Wall Street, but the fact that if cops just wanted to bust heads, they are deterred by the fact that almost all Israelis have served in the military, and have at least some training in hand to hand combat as a result serves as a deterrent.

Thus we have the Israeli cabinet voting to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations:

Israel’s summertime protest movement, which was occupying “Wall Street” before it was cool, can now celebrate their first major tangible success.

At a Sunday cabinet meeting the government approved the restructuring of Israel’s tax system, shifting a few degrees of the social burden onto corporations and the very rich.

On Monday, during the opening day of the winter session of parliament after a three-month summer break, legislators received the new tax plan for approval, alongside a lengthy list of demands for financial reform and social justice that were nonexistent when the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, was last in session and which have been catapulted to the forefront of a pre-electoral year.

As lawmakers gathered it became clear that Likud, the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, hoped the government’s imprimatur of approval on significant changes in taxation would shift credit from the young protest leaders to the party itself.

This reminds me of a story from the 1960s, when there was a protest against German Chancellor Adenour at a university, and the police went in with batons swinging, and were physically ejected from campus by the protesters.

Obviously, part of this is that Netanyahu, and Likud, are scrambling to avoid an electoral debacle in the next election.

They are widely loathed at this point, and deservedly so, because they have aggressively promoting and implementing Thatchernomics, cutting taxes on the wealthy and raising indirect taxes (particularly indirect ones like sales taxes, fees, etc.) on everyone else.

There are real economic issues driving these changes, but if a few dozen cops been able to rout the demonstrators at the beginning of their protests, the discontent would have remained buried for a while longer.