Photos: Occupy DC Turns into Tent City

This past summer I saw tent city protests all over Israel. These mostly young Israelis pitched tents to protest the high housing costs and lack of affordable housing in Israel. Voluntarily living in tents was a powerful symbolic demonstration. Well, the tent cities have come to our shores, at least in Washington, D.C. as part of the Occupy DC branch of the larger Occupy Wall Street movement. But these tents are for more practical purposes -- to protect the growing community of the hunkered-down demonstrators in McPherson Square from the rain and harsh elements as cool fall weather settles in and winter will bring the cold and snow to the nation's capital.

Here are recent photos.

Photos: Israel Tent City Protests

This Friday I passed by the growing Occupy D.C. demonstration encampment at McPherson Square in downtown Washington and was amazed to see that since last weekend the park has been transformed from a few sleeping bags into a tent city. It is amazing how similar it looks to the tent cities I saw across Israel this past summer.

The Israeli Summer has turned into the American Autumn and while some of the issues being addressed by the demonstrators might be different (unemployment in the United States versus the high cost of living in Israel), there is a strong thread running through these movements, and it has to do with government being accountable to the people and not corporations and the richest 1%. The demonstrators on the East Coast and Middle East want to ensure that, as Abraham Lincoln so eloquently stated in his Gettysburg Address, "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Click here for a link to photos I took last weekend of the Occupy D.C. demonstration (before the tents were pitched).

And here are photos I snapped this past summer of the demonstrations around Israel.

TEL AVIV

BEERSHEBA

MITZPE RAMON

JERUSALEM