Tea is often best served with honey, so it’s fitting that the first major legal battle Israel’s Tea-Party-equivalent has taken on is against the government’s not-so-sweet regulations on selling and cultivating honey.
Almost every aspect of the economy is highly regulated and taxed in Israel. So what’s a free market proponent to do? Members of the Israeli Freedom Movement – a group inspired by the U.S. Tea Party – decided it was time to stand up for individual rights, so they sued the government.
FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe and Israeli Freedom Movement founder Boaz Arad at Tel Aviv "Kosher Tea" event
Yes, tea party fever has made it to Israel. The movement launched this summer around the time a group of FreedomWorks activists traveled to Israel for Glenn Beck’s Restoring Courage events and made a special trip to Tel Aviv to meet with like-minded believers in individual rights. There they met Boaz Arad, a founder of the Israeli Freedom Movement, who impressed them with his knowledge of classical free-market thinkers including Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand.
In an interview with The Blaze, Arad says that since August the group has recruited more than 500 members:
“We view ourselves as allies, friends, ideological partners with the American Tea Party’s struggle. We view the American Tea Party movement as a noble movement that for the first time in the past 100 years offers an alternative to the deterioration of the world’s largest, freest superpower in the direction of socialism and statism.”