J.J. Goldberg August 4, 2011

Israeli novelist-travel writer Yuval Ben-Ami weighs in at the +972 blog with a clever take on the snowballing Israeli economic Israel protest:

Our situation as Israelis is currently comparable to that of the customer in Monty Python’s sketch, who walks into a cheese shop intent on buying cheese, only to discover that the shop is utterly bereft of cheese. The shopkeeper does not reveal this upfront, but instead lets his customer go through an endless list of cheeses.

In a similar manner, protesters in Israel’s newly sprung tent cities and weekly-held rallies list the types of future they demand: a future for our hospitals, a future for our schools, even a future for our milk industry (no pun intended: Today saw a huge rally of dairy farmers in Tel Aviv. They protested Netanyahu’s decision to open the milk and cheese market to imports as a response to public outcry about overpriced cottage cheese).

… What are we to do? I naturally do not subscribe to John Cleese’s choice of assassinating the shopkeeper, but this future shop’s management should definitely be sacked and a boycott on their nonexistent Gruyere is a good place to start.

I’m not sure Ben-Ami isn’t reading more into the tent camps’ potential for future impact than the reality on the streets can support, but his whimsical approach is a good window into their zeitgeist. Here’s the Python original:

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