Israeli protester sets himself on fire

JERUSALEM — A protest in Tel Aviv on Saturday night took an unsettling turn when an Israeli man set himself on fire. “The state of Israel stole from me and robbed me. It left me helpless,” 57-year-old Moshe Silman wrote in letters left at the scene before dousing himself with gasoline.

With Silman’s third-degree burns covering at least 80 percent of his body, protest leaders, politicians and the public are trying to understand the act of desperation and its meaning for the calls for “social justice,” the slogan of the socioeconomic protests now into their second summer in Israel.

Silman’s fall began with failure to repay a small debt that ballooned and cast him into poverty, exasperating dealings with bureaucracy and ultimately, despair. “I shall not become homeless,” he wrote, accusing the government of humiliating and weakening its citizens, “taking from the poor and giving to the rich.” Demonstrators read his letter aloud after he set himself afire.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu extended wishes for Silman’s recovery and instructed Housing and Welfare ministers to examine his case, which he called “a great personal tragedy.”

Leaders of the protest — which began last summer as a call for affordable housing and quickly evolved into a movement protesting the high cost of living in Israel — reject personalizing Silman’s case. This was “an extreme act of a person broken by the cruelty of the system,” said Daphni Leef, a young film-school graduate and a movement founder.

Opposition leader Shelly Yachimovitch said that increasingly strict criteria for public housing and the absence of a safety net for citizens brought Silman and others “to a dead end of despair.”