The Israeli government's welfare cuts have been indiscriminate and therefore harmful. This is the message that emerged from a panel discussion on "Israeli Society Beyond the Matzav: Economic Health or Heartless Capitalism" at the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities (UJC) - the Federations of North America in Cleveland, Ohio. The cutbacks in welfare payments are a matter of ideology and not just of fiscal necessity, according to Yigal Ben Shalom, head of social security at the National Insurance Institute, and they will not be reversed as the government's revenue improves, but the cuts fail to distinguish between those who can work and those who can't. Ben Shalom said the result was that the net income of the top decile had risen 7.6% in the past two years while that of the bottom decile fell 12.6%, and 30% of Israeli children live in poverty.
One of the chief problems identified by the panel was that even those who work do not earn enough to support their families. Dr. Karnit Flug, director of research at the Bank of Israel, said that, while 90,000 jobs had been created in the past year, these were mostly low-paid or part-time, and would not pull families over the poverty line. According to Flug, the government needs to intervene to ensure that people who do work will earn enough. She pointed out that the Bank of Israel had been advocating such measures as a negative income tax, subsidized child care, and training and adult education to upgrade skills.
Dr. Neri Horowitz, a sociologist at the Mandel School for Leadership and a lecturer at the Hebrew University and Ben Gurion University, called for a "new deal" to reinforce the confidence of the middle class in Israel in the country's social security system, so that they would not feel cheated by it as they do today. He proposed that US Jewish philanthropy in Israel should be directed towards investment in strategic thinking, rather than towards immediate assistance to the poor, in order to help in devising this new deal. Horowitz cited the example of think tanks in Britain that had contributed to the reform of social policy.
The majority of Jews in the US appear to support expanding rather than contracting the welfare system in their own country, as shown in their support for Senator Kerry in the recent presidential election. Asked whether the trend towards an outright capitalist society in Israel might not alienate them and diminish their inclination to give to Israeli causes, Susie Gelman, chair of UJC Israel, said that Diaspora Jewish communities needed to continue to educate themselves about Israeli society. Israel, she said, was going through a cataclysm, and there was a need to avoid the temptation to respond on the basis of emotion. She pointed out that the US too had had to move from welfare to work.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on Tuesday, November 16, 2004