Ina Friedman, Senior Reporter for the Jerusalem Report and co-author of “Murder in the Name of God: The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin”, spoke at our offices recently. Here is an edited transcript of her talk.
Thirst for Solidarity
There are some interesting findings from the recent Herziliya Conference. Every year this conference is held with top businessmen, academics and guests from all over the world, who come to talk about Israel’s national strength.
This year one of the polls for the conference was about patriotism – to find out how strong Israel is by gauging the patriotism of its citizens (just as an aside, Jews are more patriotic than the Arabs – a real shock, I know – but Arabs are more patriotic than we expect them to be).
The main thing that this poll of the so-called patriotism index found was that there is a very strong identification with what the pollsters call the “Jewish collective’. After five years of the Intifada, and the feeling that there was no one to talk to on the other side (and this was when Abu Mazan and Fatah were in charge, before Hamas, when there really isn’t anyone to talk to) – that after all this, Israelis feel stuck in the territories. They feel they’re beating their heads against the wall.
So now there is a thirst to turn inward, for Israelis to tend their own garden, to deal with Israel’s own problems and somehow move ahead; to try to block out or pull out or do whatever allows them to draw back from the Israeli-Arab conflict, and return to what life was like in the Fifties and Sixties and Seventies – when the focus was on the building of Israel.
When Israelis were asked what they were most proud of, they mentioned Israel’s high-tech industry – advances in technology and in science. They were proud of their security forces which are competent, do a good job and are on the right track. They’re proud of Israel’s advances in culture in the world – meaning that authors like Amos Oz and David Grossman, and so forth, have been translated into 80 languages, and that Israel has become a little literary power on the world scene.
But Israelis are least proud of the way their democracy functions; and they’re least proud of the country’s social solidarity – in other words, of the way Israel relates to its weaker classes. And I would venture to say that part of that is shame for the way Israel relates to its minorities.
Not Represented by Knesset
At the end of July, just before disengagement from Gaza took place, a poll was done about the Knesset just before it was about to go into recess.
The papers were full of nothing but disengagement, and there on page 19 of Yediot [a popular Israeli newspaper] I read that 87 percent of Israelis felt that the Knesset did not represent them. Why? Not because of the disengagement, but because the parliament did not pay sufficient attention to their needs, in terms of education, welfare, unemployment and healthcare.
Or fighting crime – crime has become a big, big issue in Israel, but not so much because people’s houses are being robbed in the middle of the night. Rather it’s because organized crime has become very chutzpadik. They’re killing one another off in Chicago gangland style shootings and bombings in the streets, and perfectly innocent Israelis are being killed along with them.
Crime, healthcare, education – what we call domestic issues. And domestic issues have traditionally been second class issues in Israel. People traditionally have focused on the situation. The most important portfolios have to do with the defense ministry, the foreign ministry.
Kissinger once said that Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic policy. We always assumed that meant that Israel never saw itself as having a place in the world, or its government never concerned itself with how it interacted with the international community – it only cared about getting itself elected next time.
The thing is, Israel seems to many Israelis to have no domestic policy. Over the past 5 years there has been a growing feeling that the government is not serving the needs of its citizens – it is always focused on foreign policy – how are we going to deal with the Americans or the Palestinians?
The focus has always been outward and suddenly Israelis say, “Hello! We’ve got 11 percent unemployment and only now is it going down to 9 percent. We have a quarter of our people living below the poverty line including one-third of our children. Our government is not addressing our real needs.”
The Ravages of Globalization
Israel has suffered the ravages of globalization. We started out as a socialist society where nobody had very much but there was great equality on the bottom side of the scale. Over the years Israel has become a consumer society par excellence.
Globalization has affected us as we brought in foreign laborers, first Palestinians, then migrant laborers from all over the world. Filipinos take care of our elderly and our sick children; our construction sites are studded with people from China. Thais and Nepalis pick our tomatoes and work throughout the agricultural sector. Until the government began throwing them out, Africans were working in our restaurants and washing our floors.
There were 260,000 migrant workers in Israel from all over the world, many of them centered in south Tel Aviv, which became Israel’s Lower East Side and a place that I loved to spend time in.
The migrant workers came from poverty-stricken places to better their lives. They had zero crime. There was, amazingly in Israel, no xenophobic reaction to their presence here. They provided services that people enjoyed and they weren’t chutzpadik or offensive and they didn’t demand that you bond with them and they didn’t boss you around.
But it was in many ways a destructive experience – not socially, but economically, because the migrant workers worked for less than the minimum wage. They brought the entire wage scale down.
Half of them were legal, half were illegal. Legal ones are still being brought in; they still work in home care, construction and agriculture. The illegal ones were brutally thrown out by a new branch of the police force called the immigration police. Their jobs have not necessarily been filled by Israelis, because Israelis don’t want to wash floors and work in restaurants and so forth. There’s a great, great dearth of cleaning people in Israel now – it’s very tough to find someone to clean your house.
Out of Kilter
Society has gotten all out of kilter here. The top twenty percent of wage earners are earning forty percent of the pie. The middle class is shrinking because their wages are going down, and because of government cutbacks for education and healthcare. The middle class is growing poorer because it is paying out of pocket for the kind of healthcare it wants and for supplementary education for its children.
Down at the bottom, people aren’t even being paid the minimum wage even though there’s a minimum wage law. Forty-one percent of people living below the poverty line in Israel are the working poor.
For instance, we have this new thing in Israel called “manpower companies”. If you work for the government there are laws governing benefits, wages, etc. But the government now out-sources its jobs to these Israeli manpower companies, who do not honor minimum wage laws and benefit laws – so the laws that we already have to protect workers are not being enforced.
Besides, when workers say they want more money, they’re told that if they get more money foreign investors are going to stop investing in their industries, or the factories will move to Jordan, where there are no minimum wage laws.
Somebody studied the American model very well.
NGO Boom
In the past fifteen years we have had an enormous flourishing of Non-Government Organizations or NGOs. The development of what’s called civil society has usually been associated with developing countries. Their governments are weak and they can’t get their acts together quickly and NGOs begin to sprout and grow to service the needs of communities or spotlight for the government where work is to be done.
In general it’s a self-empowerment movement – if the government is failing you take responsibility and help yourself. There’s a long Jewish tradition of NGOs. For instance when my father came to America he helped form the Austrian-Hungarian credit union, and it used to give loans to the Landsmannschaft [fraternal organizations founded by Jewish immigrants in America].
We never had that in Israel. Israel grew up with the tradition that it’s the government’s responsibility to do everything. However, since the late 80’s there’s been this mushrooming of NGOs. They come to life at various times depending on the issues. It began with NGOs like B’Tselem, which brought to the attention of the Israeli public for the first time what was really going on inside the territories. In the 90’s, there was a mushrooming of environmental NGOs. There are now, unbelievably, over 80 environmental NGOs in Israel. The reason for this proliferation of environmental NGOs is that the environmental ministry in Israel is very small and weak. When you have a void, NGOs come and fill it up.
The latest NGOs deal with poverty and hunger. Now you have groups that not only give out food on Rosh Hashanah, but they run soup kitchens and they help set up what we call time-banks. Within communities, people barter their services: I’ll give you a manicure, if you baby-sit my kids tonight.
What It Means
What the NGOs have done for us is they’ve spotlighted how hard it is to govern the country. The political system is unstable. We have 15 parties in the Knesset – this means that one coalition partner can leave and bring you down. The right wing of your party can turn against you, as happened both to Netanyahu and Sharon.
We should have elections every four years but since 1995 we’ve had four elections in ten years. When your government is unstable to this degree, it’s hard to plan rationally; it’s hard to plan ahead for things like development and the environment, where long-term vision – sometimes planning for the next hundred years – is needed.
The NGOs have really helped Israelis focus on what our problems are. This is a big change in Israel, and it’s made citizens more sensitive to things beyond THE SITUATION.
