Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Back to Opinion

Comparing Bibi’s Israel to (Drum Roll) Monty Python’s ‘Cheese Shop’

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:

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.