Israel has third highest gap between rich and poor in the world.

21 percent of Israelis live below the poverty line, making Israel the country with the highest percentage in the west.

​

"Thousands of Israeli Holocaust Survivors Still Living in Poverty, Fighting for Recognition: Seventy years after the end of WWII, some 20,000 aging Holocaust survivors receive little or no support from Israel, and 45,000 live under poverty line." https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-holocaust-survivors-still-living-in-poverty-1.5350605

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​​Israeli Jews Fight Back Against the Government

​

In July of 2011 the people in Israel (mainly, but not only Jews) launched a huge wave of protests against the Israeli government over the issue of their economic impoverishment.

 

"The 2011 Israeli social justice protests (Hebrew: מְחָאַת צֶדֶק חֶבְרָתִי‎), which are also referred to by various other names in the media, were a series of demonstrations in Israel beginning in July 2011 involving hundreds of thousands of protesters from a variety of socio-economic and religious backgrounds opposing the continuing rise in the cost of living (particularly housing) and the deterioration of public services such as health and education. A common rallying cry at the demonstrations was the chant; "The people demand social justice!".

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"As the protests expanded during August 2011, the demonstrations began to also focus on other related issues relating to the social order and power structure in Israel." [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Israeli_social_justice_protests ]

 

The movement kept growing and growing, with mass demonstrations and people pitching tents on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. The movement reached its peak on September 3, 2011:

 

“On Saturday, September 3, an estimated 450,000 people participated in several demonstrations which were held over various locations across Israel and which were referred to by protest organizers as ‘The March of the Million.”

[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2011_Israeli_social_justice_protests#September_3rd:_The_.22March_of_the_Million.22 ]

​

"In the Tel Aviv march rally, which was held between the Rothschild Boulevard and the State Square, an estimated 300 thousand protesters participated though using proprietary technology to measure mobile phone signals, an Israeli start-up gave a reduced estimate of the crowd of a still impressive 150,000 people in Tel Aviv. Over 100 thousand people demonstrated throughout the rest of Israel in various demonstrations (40 thousand in Jerusalem, 30 thousand in Haifa, 15 thousand in Afula, 8,000 in Kiryat Motzkin, 3,000 in Nahariya, 2,500 in Hadera, 3000 in Karmiel and Rosh Pina, 5000 in Kiryat Shmona, 10 thousands in Kfar Yehoshua, 500 in Arad, 800 in Mitzpe Ramon and approximately 1,000 in Eilat).[68][69][70]

​

"The next day, Channel 10 reported about an internal memo describing the demands of the organizers including 45 billion NIS which would obligate the government to increase the budget. The organizers proposed to make up for the shortfall with increased taxes of the rich, inheritance tax, and using surplus tax money.[71]" 

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2011_Israeli_social_justice_protests ]

 

People were demanding basic economic things, such as affordable housing. Many Israelis could no longer afford to pay their rent. And the demonstrators wanted relief to come in part from "increased taxes of the rich."

 

“The cost of living in Israel is horrendous,” said Daniel Levy, a senior fellow and director of the Middle East Policy Initiative at the New America Foundation. “It’s hellishly expensive compared to what people earn and the inequality gap has only gotten wider.” [ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/world-july-dec11-israel_08-19/  ]

 

The Guardian reported:

​

"Saturday's demonstrations followed 50 days of protests that have rattled political leaders and led commentators and analysts to ask whether a new social movement would transform Israeli domestic politics for the next generation.

​

"The movement, which has the support of about 90% of the population according to opinion polls, began when a small group of activists erected tents in Tel Aviv's prosperous Rothschild Boulevard in protest at high rents and house prices.

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"Tent cities mushroomed across the country and protesters rallied behind the slogan: "The people demand social justice." Among the issues raised were the cost of housing, transport, childcare, food and fuel; the low salaries paid to many professionals, including doctors and teachers; tax reform; and welfare payments. The government established a committee led by the economics professor Manuel Trajtenberg to examine the protesters' demands, which is due to report later this month.

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"Demonstrators in Tel Aviv on Saturday night blew whistles and banged drums as they marched in a carnival atmosphere to a large square for a rally. Residents hung banners from balconies and cheered as they passed." [my emphasis]

​

Another newspaper subsequently reported:

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"While the social justice movement lacked a centralized leadership or clear goals for most of the summer, this didn’t stop it from gaining widespread sympathy from constituencies far beyond its leftist base. “Even though the momentum was clearly from the Left, all kinds of Israelis joined,” explained Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. “There were settlers…there were Haredim. It was seen as a national movement.” A poll released one month prior by Israel’s Channel 10 found that 85 percent of the country supported the protestors, which would be impressive in its own right, but proved even more significant once the numbers were examined in depth." [my emphasis]

​

Note that the demonstrations had the support of around 90% of the population! This wave of demonstrations was not about grievances that only affected the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who are well known to be a sub-set of Jews in Israel who suffer from discrimination. No! It was against the economic oppression that harms ALL working class Israeli Jews as well as non-Jews. Nor were the grievances of the demonstrators things that only affected Israel's non-Jews: The Guardian article reports that some people on the Left didn't like that the demonstrations were against how Jews as well as non-Jews were oppressed:

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"The protests have been criticised by some on the left for not paying more attention to the discrimination suffered by Israeli-Arabs, who make up 20% of Israel's population, or Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories."

​

These demonstrations elicited solidarity between Jews and non-Jews. The Guardian reports:

​

"At a rally in Haifa, Shahin Nasser, an Israeli-Arab, said: 'Today we are changing the rules of the game. No more coexistence based on hummus and fava beans. What is happening here is true coexistence, when Arabs and Jews march together shoulder to shoulder calling for social justice and peace. We've had it.'"

​

Another Guardian article reported on how the protesters included "middle class" people (a.k.a. working class people better off than other working class people):

​

"The Facebook-driven tent villages across Israel have echoes of the pro-democracy movements across the Middle East, but Nadav was quick to point out important differences. "This is a middle-class protest, focused on one issue. People in Egypt didn't have a lot to lose. They had no civil rights and no trust in their government." But, he added, "I've kind of lost my trust in my government too because it doesn't serve my needs."

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"The Israeli government is alarmed at the spread of the protests and how the issue has united left and right, religious and secular, and the middle-class with their less-affluent fellow citizens.

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"The housing protest swiftly followed a widespread consumer boycott of cottage cheese in protest at the high cost of dairy products. Dairy companies were forced to cut prices, and the government initiated a review of the industry." [my emphasis]

 

An indication of the anger fueling the demonstrations is the fact that a small businessman, a Jew named Moshe Silman, during a 2012 demonstration, committed suicide by self-immolation; here is what Wikipedia reports about his suicide letter:

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"Silman set himself on fire during a social justice demonstration held on 14 July 2012. In the suicide letter he passed out before he burnt himself, he accused the state of Israel and the welfare system of failing to treat disadvantaged people in his situation. He blamed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz for the economic policy that led him to commit suicide: "I hold the State of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu and Steinitz, the bastards, accountable for the humiliation which the disadvantaged citizens, go through every day, as the rich and the government workers take from the poor."

 

Clearly there was working class solidarity that frightened the Israeli ruling upper class!

​

Zionism Killed the Movement

​

What did Prime Minister Netanyahu do? Did he grant the demands of “his people”? No! He killed the movement by letting the Zionist ideology do its job: demanding that the demonstrators (the Jews, at least) act "patriotically," i.e., support their [billionaire- controlled] government in the fight against “the real enemy”: Palestinians. When Hamas  fires its rockets onto Israeli noncombatant civilians it greatly helps Israeli leaders such as Netanyahu to control the rebellious Israeli working class! Netanyahu killed the movement with Zionism. Here's how.

​

The Saturday September 4 "March of the Million" took place shortly after an attack (on August 18) in which Palestinians killed eight Israelis and Israel responded with an air attack. In response to the Palestinians' attack, "protest organizers decided that the demonstrations planned for that Saturday would still go ahead, but as silent candle-lit marches without speeches or music. From this point on, movement spokespeople’s statements began to pander directly to sentiments of vulnerability and patriotism." [https://libcom.org/library/israels-%E2%80%98tent-protests%E2%80%99-chilling-effect-nationalism] Fear of the "real enemy"--Palestinians--began to demobilize the movement.

​

A Guardian article September 4, 2011--one day following the "March of the Million" that was the peak of the movement-- reported another example of how the bogeyman enemy of Palestinians, which was created by the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, was used to demobilize this huge Israeli working class movement against the Israeli billionaire ruling class:

​

"Weekly demonstrations, whose turnout had been steadily building, were suspended for two weeks after an attack by militants near the Egyptian-Israeli border in which eight Israelis were killed. Some commentators suggested that the movement had lost its momentum."

​

​Despite the huge participation and support for this movement, it did not win its demands. As the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reported/admitted five years later about the effect of the demonstrations, in an article trying to put a positive "successful" gloss on them:

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"It may not have changed the fact that those who led the government then are still in charge today. It didn’t even change Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s basic way of thinking about the economy and society, and it didn’t change the relative amounts spent on civilian social services as a percentage of GDP. These have all remained as they were."

​

Preventing Israeli working class Jewish people from winning their struggles against their oppression by the billionaire Jewish ruling class is the very purpose of Zionism. It is the purpose of the brutal and violent ethnic cleansing of non-Jews (Palestinians) from most of Palestine: to create a bogeyman enemy with which to frighten and control and thereby exploit and oppress working class Israeli Jews. As long as the Israeli billionaire ruling class can keep most Israeli working class Jews mortally frightened of Palestinians as "the real enemy," a veritable existential enemy, then the ruling class can be confident that these Israeli Jews, despite their real grievances against the Israeli ruling class, will limit how far they will go to challenge its power over them because they view it as their protector against their real enemy.

 

Until Israeli Jews see that Palestinians are not their enemy but indeed their ally against their real enemy, they will continue to remain oppressed by the Israeli ruling class.

​

This anti-working-class function/purpose of Zionism is seldom mentioned explicitly in the mass media. But there are indirect references to it. Here's one, reported by the Christian Science Monitor, that makes the point by noting that when the dangerous bogeyman enemy is not in the news then working class people feel more free to stand up against the Israeli ruling class:

​

Lull in Palestinian violence turns Israelis' attention to pocketbook issues

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Netanyahu has touted himself as an responsible economic leader who supports liberalization amid a globalized economy, but the public also remembers him cutting social-welfare payments and pushing privatization of state companies as finance minister in the first half of the 2000s.

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"The housing is a symptom … . Although there is a really good macroeconomic aggregates like GDP [gross domestic product] growth and unemployment, the problem is that we have very large income inequality," says Momi Dahan, an economics professor at Hebrew University.

​

He says that such issues are coming to the fore because of a relative low in Palestinian violence.

 

"When it is quiet in the area of security, then all of the other problems come to the surface," Prof. Dahan says. "People are sick of the rules where some people get a six-digit salary, and a cleaning woman or a cashier has a hard time feeding their kids."

​

At the beginning of the 2011 demonstrations in July, the Christian Science Monitor reported about how Israelis were able to focus on their oppression by the Israeli upper ruling class (a.k.a. "pocketbook issues") when their fear of Palestinians (a.k.a. "Israeli-Palestinian violence") was relatively low:

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"Widespread fatigue with talks about an ever-elusive peace agreement, together with a relative low in Israeli-Palestinian violence, has given new momentum to such pocketbook issues. [my emphasis]

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"'There’s all the time discussion of the occupation. But the real occupation is not the occupation of Gaza or the West Bank. It’s the economic occupation,' says Amit Adler, a writer and spokesman for the Facebook-organized protest. 'It is all a distraction. We want to focus on the real issues. It’s the economy, stupid.'"

 

The flip side of the coin, of course (which the Christian Science Monitor did not point out), is that when "Israeli-Palestinian violence" is at a relative high, then that takes away "momentum to such pocketbook issues."

​

Chemi Shalev, writing in his Haaretz newspaper article about why the Israeli government uses over-the-top detention of individuals who support BDS, noted that it is for the purpose of creating an exaggerated sense of fear in Israelis out of proportion to the real danger BDS poses to Israel's government:

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"For Netanyahu and his partners, who wither when Israelis feel safe, and thrive when they feel threatened, isolated, and unfairly maligned, it's a virtual slam dunk." [cited by Sylvain Cypel in The State of Israel vs. The Jews, location 2159 e-book version]

​

Americans old enough to remember the effect of 9/11 (the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the NYC World Trade Center and Pentagon by--supposedly at least--Muslim terrorists that killed almost 3000 civilians, for those too young to remember) on anti-establishment activism know that it totally put the kibosh on all such activism because people felt that it was unpatriotic to go against "our government" that was defending us against "the terrorists." 9/11 prompted a "rally around the flag" response, as does any perceived attack by a foreign enemy. The world-wide anti-globalization movement, which was described even by some in the mass media as an anti-capitalism movement, was at its peak just before 9/11 but then virtually vanished as a result of 9/11. One of the main organizers of a large anti--globalization demonstration (called A16) that occurred just prior to 9/11 told a New Republic interviewer how 9/11 killed the movement:

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"Nadine Bloch, who organized A16, thinks 9/11 was the turning point. “It really did change the dynamic of how these mobilizations came to pass,” she said. “Some of the NGOs and nonprofits were really worried about seeming un-American.” She had helped plan a rally for October of 2001 that was, by her estimates, set to break arrest records for the nation. But after the attacks the appetite for protest disappeared—and the activists who kept at it faced unprecedented hostility from police."
 

​In Israel, the government can use the "Palestinian conflict" to make it seem like a 9/11 attack whenever it needs to put the kibosh on pro-working class activism. This is why there is a "Palestinian conflict" in the first place: it enables the Israeli upper class to control, dominate and oppress "its people."

​

The Nation Magazine, in an article titled, "Israel’s Bloated War Machine: Prime Minister Netanyahu promotes and sometimes manufactures an endless series of national security crises. The military and settlers win; everyone else loses," put it this way:

​

"Netanyahu controls the people of Israel by intimidating them with existential threats—if it’s not nuclear Iran, then it’s the tunnels of Hamas. If not ISIS, then Hezbollah in Lebanon. If not an international flotilla of solidarity activists trying to break the blockade on Gaza, it’s anti-Semitism taking over Europe. The premier has led his people to believe that it’s them against the world."

​

Zionist Israeli leaders have worked very hard and unfortunately very successfully--with help from certain anti-working class Palestinian leaders such as the leaders of Hamas, as I discuss here--to make Jewish Israelis fear (and hence hate) ordinary Palestinians. A 2021 Rand Corporation study of Israeli Jewish opinion found:

​

"“One of our key goals was to determine if there were areas of overlap in opinions and feeling among Israelis and Palestinians that might offer avenues for negotiation, leading the parties closer to peace,” said Daniel Egel, lead author of the report and an economist at nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND. “Sadly, the data show the opposite. The data highlight the deep distrust and profound animosity of each side for the other.”"

​

The social justice movement was unable to become a movement that could truly win its demands because it was unwilling to refute the Israeli government's reason for not granting--paying for-- those demands, namely that the money had to be used instead to pay for the bloated military and the expensive subsidies to the West Bank Israeli settlers for the purpose of enforcing the military Occupation of the West Bank in order to (supposedly) protect Jews from the "real enemy"--Palestinians.

 

Using the government of Israel to carry out violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to make Palestinians angry at Israel and then portraying this anger as hatred of Jews so that Israeli Jews will in turn fear and hate Palestinians is the same divide-and-rule strategy that the American upper class in the southern states used to divide-and-rule working class Americans by using Jim Crow discrimination against blacks to pit black and white working class people against each other in order to oppress them both, as Martin Luther King, Jr. explains in a speech you can listen to and read here.  The violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is no more about protecting ordinary Jews from harm than the racist Jim Crow laws were about improving the lives of the poor whites!

 

Read "Governments Use Violence to Provoke Hatred" to see how the Communist leaders of the Serbian and Croatian governments each used violence--in the name of their own people--against the other nation's population for the purpose of demobilizing the pro-democracy movements in each nation that threatened to remove these Communist leaders from power; it's the same playbook being used by the Israeli and Palestinian upper classes to demobilize the Israeli and Palestinian working classes. 

​

Israel's ruling class is rich and powerful

​

"Israel's richest families control 34 percent of top income. Nineteen businessmen and their families control more than third of income of Israel's 500 leading companies." [ https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3427561,00.html ]

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"The income of the 18 wealthiest families in Israel is equivalent to 77 percent of Israel's national budget, which is NIS 256 billion a year, and constitutes 32 percent of the country's revenues, according to a survey conducted by the Business Data Israel company published Monday." [Haaretz, 13/02/2006, article posted by Ora Coren and Lilach Weissman, Haaretz Correspondents]

​

Who are the Israeli billionaires? See here a listing of them by name along with their net worth and its main source. Read details here about the top 30 richest people in Israel.

​

Writing in Promarket, the publication of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Asher Schechter states in a November, 2019 article:

​

"The corruption scandals in which Netanyahu has been ensnared revealed more than just the misdeeds of one man. What they exposed is far more insidious: an entire ecosystem of institutionalized corruption in which opposing gangs of monopolistic oligarchs pressure politicians and policymakers for regulatory concessions that hinder competition, often by using the media outlets they own (and the journalists they employ) as leverage. This system has been in place long before Netanyahu came to power."

​

Haaretz newspaper wrote on August 28, 2019 about the Israeli media owned by the billionaires in an article headlined, "How Israeli Media Became a Playground for Billionaires: Instead of developing a competitive, decentralized market, a handful of businessmen are acquiring newspapers, websites and TV channels in order to gain influence."

​

Though establishment media prattle about how Israel is a democracy with a representative government, the truth is that it is the same as the United States, an oligarchy in which billionaires (and the generals and politicians beholden to them and vetted for their dedication to preserving the class inequality that makes the existence of billionaires possible) have the real power despite the trappings of representative democracy. 

​

This academic study of who has the real power in the United States, reported in the journal Perspectives on Politics [DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595 ] published September 18, 2014, by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, (also described here and here and here) concludes with the following statements:

 

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism."

 

"When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it."

 

"Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened."

​

Like the United States, Israel is an oligarchy; it is ruled by Israeli billionaires (and generals and politicians beholden to them) using the trappings of a representative democracy to hide the fact that it is a fake democracy.

​

​

The Israel Ruling Class is Oppressing Ordinary Jewish Israelis

​

The French Le Monde diplomatique in 2003 wrote an article titled, “Israel’s age of austerity” reporting the following:

​

There is another campsite of the unemployed and homeless in Tel Aviv. It was set up in August 2002 in one of the richest districts on Kikar Medina (State Square), which the protesters call Kikar HaLehem (Bread Square). Dozens live there, with their children, in old buses or tents. So far, all attempts by the local authority and property owners to have them removed have failed.

​

“The choice of place is no accident,” says Israel Twito, 38, a divorcee who is bringing up three daughters alone. “The contrast between our miserable campsite and the neighbourhood’s luxury shops and apartment blocks symbolises the ever-widening abyss between rich and poor.”

​

On 28 August the popular Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot ran the front-page headline “A million Israelis are hungry”. Earlier this year researchers at the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee’s Brookdale Institute, in collaboration with the Ministry of Health, reported that 400,000 Israeli families - 22% of the total - were suffering from “nutritional insecurity”, since they could not provide their children regularly with the food they need for proper growth.

​

Some ate smaller portions, others skipped meals. In the worst cases, they ate nothing all day. Meals were monotonous and poor in meat, dairy products, fruit and vegetables. Four out of five of these families said things have worsened in the past two years and their economic situation is more precarious: 5% admitted seeking food aid from soup kitchens or charities. According to another poll published by the humanitarian charity Latet (Giving), the number of Israelis applying for food aid jumped by 46% in a year. The main applicants are single-parent and large families.

​

Public opinion was shocked by the simultaneous announcement of the huge profits made by Israel’s banks. The largest, Bank Hapoalim, announced net profits of 335m shekels ($75m) for the second quarter of 2003, an increase of 59%. Israel Discount Bank’s profit rose to 116m shekels ($26m) for the same period, 36.5% more than in 2002. The combined profits of the five largest banks (Hapoalim, Leumi, Discount, Hamizrahi and BenLeumi) for the first half of 2003 are 1,400m shekels ($314m), 130% higher than the first half of 2002.

​

Sh’ma, A Journal of Jewish Ideas in 2003 wrote in an article titled, “Penury and Hunger in Israel,” how:

​

"[V]ociferous segments of the public are demanding that governmental resources be channeled to welfare and other domestic resources, rather than to strengthening settlements beyond the green line." [ http://shma.com/2003/05/penury-and-hunger-in-israel/  ]

​

Challenge magazine in 2005 wrote :

​

"Recent measures taken by Israel’s government to undermine the welfare state have harmed women first of all, both Arab and Jewish. Of the Jewish, many who in the past had gained a foothold in the middle class find themselves shunted to the margins of society. The income supplements they depended on have been whisked out from under them. The same cuts have worsened the plight of Arab women. Despite the fact that both groups, indeed the lower classes in general on both the Arab and Jewish sides, suffer from an erosion in living-standards – and often for identical reasons – there is an utter lack of dialogue between them." [ https://www.challenge-mag.com/poverty-meeting-ground-for-arab-jewish-women/ ]

​

The Jewish Daily Forward in 2006 reported:

​

"Israel’s growing population of retirees has been reduced to a state of profound economic insecurity in recent years, as self-styled economic reformers have hollowed out the Jewish state’s time-honored system of care for the elderly. Pensions have been frozen. Social security payments, known in Israel as national insurance, have been relentlessly whittled away — cut by 35% in a single decade. Health care and prescription drug coverage have been slashed, along with funds for senior housing and assisted living. It’s part of a deliberate move by Jerusalem policy-makers to modernize Israel’s economy, by which they mean to remodel it along American lines. Determined to bury the socialist ethos of Israel’s founders, successive governments since the mid-1980s have slashed income supports and welfare payments even as they’ve privatized and deregulated industries, opened capital markets to international competition and reduced workers’ job security (they call it “liberalizing labor laws”). Over the past three years, under the economic leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, the reforms have been ramped up to a revolution."

​

The Forward explains the "meteoric rise of the Pensioners' Party" in the April, 2006 election this way: 

​

"And then there was the simple, glaring fact of poverty. Too many Israelis had reached the point where their own personal security seemed more precarious than their country’s." [ http://forward.com/opinion/editorial/1202/the-passion-of-the-pension/  ]

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In June of 2015 rt.com titled an article, “​Israel’s poor getting poorer, income gap among largest in developed world – study” that reported:

​

Israel remains among the poorest performing countries in terms of economic equality, while poverty depth, that is how poor the poor are, has worsened, a new study says. A big cutback in government social welfare programs is one of the causes.

​

The study of Israel’s economic life, “A Picture of the Nation 2015,” was published Thursday by the Jerusalem-based Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel. The study compared Israeli numbers to those of other 33 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

​

In terms of inequality, Israel remains among the worst in the OECD, the report said. It is on par with the US and bests only Mexico in this regard. The Taub Center’s researchers blame demographic differences, large income gaps in the labor market, and the low effectiveness of the governmental social programs for the situation.

​

The income gap was pushed wider by how Israelis own real estate and pay rent, with the wealthier segments of society getting most of the rental income. The richest 20 percent receive twice as much from rent as the 80 percent does. 

​

In May of 2017 rt.com titled an article, “Israel’s economy heading for disaster, experts warn,” which said:

​

A report released by the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel shows the country has the highest poverty rates among OECD countries and faces “worrisome trends” that could have disastrous effects on its growing population…

The country ranks 22nd out of 34 of the OECD (The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) regarding GDP and takes the 24th spot within the market income poverty rate. Among developed countries, Israel has the highest percentage of its population living below the poverty line. [ https://getpocket.com/a/read/1763072169 ]

 

Israel's poverty minimum wage

​

In 2014 Israel's national labor union, Histadrut, won an increase in the minimum wage by threatening a general strike. This strike threat resulted in the minimum wage rising to 5000 NIS/month which equates to $8.77/hr. As absurdly low as this wage is, it is even worse when one takes into account that the prices of what working class people must buy are far higher in Israel than in the United States, as you can see in detail here; for example when a gallon of regular milk cost $3.24 in the U.S. it cost (the equivalent in U.S. dollars) $6.85 in Israel!

​

It's even worse! "11% of Israeli workers earn less than minimum wage."

​

"In 2017 33.6% of Israeli workers earned no more than the minimum wage, up from 30.8% in 2015, indicating that many of the new jobs are low-paying jobs. Israel's middle class has shrunk more than almost all those of OECD countries except Estonia and Lithuania, with only 54% of households considered middle class." [Source: http://mastermindexhibition.blogspot.com/2020/02/ ] As noted above, however, the huge 2011 demonstrations against the government in Israel were considered to be demonstrations by the middle class against its economic oppression.

 

Israeli workers are forced to go on strike all the time. Here are examples:

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2015 Strike ends in victory for Israeli chemical workers

http://www.industriall-union.org/strike-ends-in-victory-for-israeli-chemical-workers

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2016 Israel: Tel Aviv labor strike may delay immigration processing

https://www.forum-expat-management.com/posts/12131-israel-tel-aviv-labor-strike-may-delay-immigration-processing

​

2017 Strike over Teva Pharm job cuts briefly shuts down Israel

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-economy-strike/strike-over-teva-pharm-job-cuts-briefly-shuts-down-israel-idUSKBN1EB07V

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2018 Israel braces for general strike on Wednesday, government says may be averted

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-strike/israel-braces-for-general-strike-on-wednesday-government-says-may-be-averted-idUSKCN1NB29G

 

More recent articles about the poverty of Israelis are the following:

 

a. Israel’s Greatest Stigma: Poverty

https://www.futuredirections.org.au/publication/israels-greatest-stigma-poverty/?fbclid=IwAR0r05l1pqwAZQxLl8ZRe_i8kWBWI-vFlR6E9WhiZqJRZytv8qNMxm6wjoQ

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b. Israel's poverty rate rises as standard of living crashes, report finds

https://www.ynetnews.com/business/article/SyxaYXwJO

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c. Israel’s Middle Class Slides Into Poverty

https://jewishjournal.com/news/332482/israels-middle-class-slides-into-poverty/

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d. Poverty In Israel

https://www.latet.org.il/en/world-1/articles/poverty-in-israel

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e. 1.8 million Israelis, half of them children, live in poverty — government

https://www.timesofisrael.com/1-8-million-israelis-half-of-them-children-live-in-poverty-government/

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f. About two million Israelis live below the poverty line - report

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/israel-report-about-two-million-people-live-below-the-poverty-line-656317

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g. February 11, 2019: ISRAELI 'YELLOW VESTS' SWARM KNESSET: COST OF LIVING OUT OF CONTROL: "If the price of electricity goes up one shekel, we will plan protests the likes of which haven’t been seen in the State of Israel"

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h. 27 June, 2018: "The Israelis struggling with poverty and the high cost of living": "We came with our savings and it was not long before we became disenchanted. We found ourselves in an apartment with leaks and mould on the ceiling, for a rent three times higher than in Paris,” she recalls, a year after going back to France." “"Around 10 per cent of Israelis live abroad. Economically, it is quite a large figure and rather worrying,” confirms Bendelac. The main reason behind this Israeli migration is the search for a better job with much better pay, enough to be able to afford a decent place to live."

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i. February 3, 2021 "Israel’s Middle Class Slides Into Poverty" [ https://jewishjournal.com/news/332482/israels-middle-class-slides-into-poverty/ ]

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j. Tel Aviv: poverty and eviction in the world’s most expensive city

Residents of Givat Amal Bet neighbourhood forced out to make way for further gentrification [ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/12/tel-aviv-poverty-eviction-givat-amal-bet-gentrification-worlds-most-expensive-city ]

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EVEN HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS!

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a. Thousands of Israeli Holocaust Survivors Still Living in Poverty, Fighting for Recognition: Seventy years after the end of WWII, some 20,000 aging Holocaust survivors receive little or no support from Israel, and 45,000 live under poverty line. https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/.premium-holocaust-survivors-still-living-in-poverty-1.5350605

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b. A quarter of Israel's Holocaust survivors living in poverty. https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/quarter-of-israels-holocaust-survivors-living-in-poverty-588381

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c. Holocaust survivors struggling to make ends meet in Israel: Ros Dayan survived horrors of Nazi persecution but now says she does not have enough money to buy food or clothes. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/apr/19/holocaust-survivor-struggle-money-israel]

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d. Holocaust Survivors Protest Israel’s Stipend Plan JERUSALEM, Aug. 5 — Several dozen survivors of the Holocaust, supported by hundreds of younger relatives and supporters, marched in protest today in front of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office, saying that a planned government stipend was too small, insulting both the living and the dead. Carrying signs that said, “Let us live in dignity,” the demonstrators demanded that Mr. Olmert issue a formal statement revoking a government decision to provide a stipend next year of 83 shekels, or about $20, a month to the country’s Holocaust survivors. A few wore yellow stars of David, reminiscent of the ones the Nazis forced Jews to wear, but many wore black T-shirts with the words in yellow: “The Holocaust is still with us — the survivors.” [ https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/world/middleeast/05cnd-mideast.html ]

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THE WEALTH DISTRIBUTION OF JEWS VERSUS NON-JEWS

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Those interested in knowing the wealth distribution of Jews versus non-Jews in Israel can find information about this in an academic journal at https://www.jstor.org/stable/41290095 and in this more accessible article at https://sites.tufts.edu/gis/files/2016/01/Gardiner_Ryan_DHPP207_2016.pdf .  In Israel, non-Jews (about 20% of the population) are on average poorer than Jews. So what? Does this fact make the impoverished condition of the Holocaust survivors in Israel (who demonstrated against the Israeli government in 2007--see the links to this above) one iota better? Of course not!

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ZIONIST LEADERS HAVE BEEN BETRAYING ORDINARY JEWS SINCE THE HOLOCAUST

 

My compilation, titled "Evidence that Israeli/Zionist Leaders Want Jews to Die at the Hands of Apparent Anti-Semites,"  shows that Zionist leaders have, since the Holocaust, been using ordinary Jews, for whom they had/have nothing but contempt, to gain and now control a state of THEIR own--not of ordinary Jews! Here is one small excerpt from this compilation. Please read the entire linked compilation.

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1943

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What did the Zionist leadership do to rescue Jews during the actual years of the Holocaust? On December 11, 1943, the Jewish Forward, largest Yiddish newspaper in the world, criticized the Zionist leaders, writing,

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"The Jewish Conference [a Zionist organization] is alive only when there is something in the air which has to do with a Commonwealth in Palestine, and it is asleep when it concerns rescue work for the Jews in the Diaspora." [19]

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Baruch Kimmerling, in his review of Yosef Grodzinsky's In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle Between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II, writes:

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"Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000 orphans, who were in physical and emotional danger as a result of the harsh winter of 1945, from the camps in Germany to England, where the Jewish community had managed to secure them permits. Another group of roughly 500 children of camp inhabitants was barred, after Zionist intervention, from reaching France, whose rabbinical institutions had offered them safe haven." [20]

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The head of the World Zionist Organization's Zionist Rescue Committee in Budapest during the war, Rudolf Kastner, later a prominent member of Israel's government under Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, collaborated with the Nazis. In the years 1944-45, Kastner was made a V.I.P. by the Nazis and not required to wear a yellow Star of David because, in exchange for being allowed to hand pick 1600 prominent Jews, including his own relatives and friends, to emigrate to Palestine, he helped Adolf Eichmann lure a half million Hungarian and Transylvanian Jews to their death without a fight by arranging for phony postcards "from other Jews" to convince them that the trains to the death camps were merely taking them to be "resettled." The betrayal was especially horrible because Eichmann only had "150 men and only a few thousand Hungarian soldiers at his disposal" and the Jews, had they known the truth, could have easily carried out a mass escape to territory that the Nazis did not occupy. These facts came out in a famous 1954 Israeli libel trial in which Kastner initially thought he could silence his accuser but, as the trial developed and witness after witness came forward to confirm the accusations, he began to shift his defense to the claim that he had only done what all top Zionist leaders of the time advocated. At this point Kastner was "conveniently" assassinated by persons unknown. [21]

1942

Zionist sabotage of rescue efforts was an established policy as early as 1942. In a letter to The Times (of London), June 6, 1961, Rabbi Dr. Solomon Schonfeld, Chairman of the wartime Rescue Committee established by the Chief Rabbi of Britain, describes how the Zionist leadership in Great Britain opposed efforts to rescue European Jews from the Holocaust. He writes that, contrary to the claims that the British government was "largely indifferent to and unwilling to take action in defense of the European Jews who were being massacred daily by the Nazis in spite of efforts by Zionist leaders to persuade the British Foreign Office to rouse itself into action on behalf of the victims...My experience in 1942-43 was wholly in favour of British readiness to help, openly, constructively and totally, and that this readiness met with opposition from Zionist leaders who insisted on rescue to Palestine as the only acceptable form of help."

 

Rabbi Schonfeld goes on to describe how, in December, 1942, he and others formed a Council for Rescue from the Nazi Terror which initiated a Parliamentary Rescue Committee supported by leading members of both Houses, and how they submitted a motion to Parliament calling for the government "to declare its readiness to find temporary refuge in its own territories or in territories under its control for endangered persons who are able to leave those countries; to appeal to the governments of countries bordering on enemy and enemy-occupied countries to allow temporary asylum and transit facilities for such persons; to offer to those governments, so far as practicable, such help as may be needed to facilitate their cooperation; and to invite the other Allied governments to consider similar action." But this is what happened, according to the rabbi's letter:

"As a result of widespread concern and the persistence of a few, this motion achieved within two weeks a total of 277 Parliamentary signatures of all parties. This purely humanitarian proposal met with sympathy from government circles, and I should add that H.M.Government did, in fact, issue some hundreds of Mauritius and other immigration permits -- indeed, in favour of any threatened Jewish family whom we could name. Already while the Parliamentary motion was gathering momentum, voices of dissent were heard from Zionist quarters: 'Why not Palestine?' The obvious answers that the most urgent concern was humanitarian and not political, that the Mufti-Nazi alliance ruled out Palestine for the immediate saving of lives and that Britain could not then add to her Middle East problems, were of no avail.

"At the Parliamentary meeting held on January 27, 1943, when the next steps were being energetically pursued by over 100 M.P.s and Lords, a spokesman for the Zionists announced that the Jews would oppose the motion on the grounds of its omitting to refer to Palestine. Some voices were raised in support of the Zionist view, there was considerable debate, and thereafter the motion was dead. Even the promoters exclaimed in desperation: If the Jews cannot agree among themselves, how can we help? It was useless to argue with a then current Zionist argument: 'Every nation has had its dead in the fight for its homeland -- the sufferers under Hitler are our dead in our fight'."

Why did Zionist leaders sabotage rescue efforts? The answer is spelled out very clearly in a dramatic letter. In the autumn of 1942 Nathan Schwalb (Dror) was representative of the Zionist He-Halutz (The Pioneer) organization in Geneva. At this time a Jewish rescue Working Group in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, was sending desperate appeals to He-Halutz for money to bribe senior Nazi officials to delay or prevent the transport of Czechoslovakian Jewry to Auschwitz and other death camps. Schwalb replied, in his letter to the rescue group, as follows:

"Since we have the opportunity of this courier, we are writing to the group that they must always remember that matter which is the most important, which is the main issue that must always be before our eyes. After all, the allies will be victorious. After the victory, they will once again divide up the world between the nations as they did at the end of first war. Then they opened the way for us for the first step [the British Balfour Declaration of 1917 supporting a Jewish homeland in Palestine -- JS] and now, as the war ends, we must do everything so that Eretz Yisroel [the Land of Israel -- JS] should become a Jewish state. Important steps have already been taken in this matter. As to the cry that comes from your country, we must be aware that all the nations of the Allies are spilling much blood and if we do not bring sacrifices, with what will we achieve the right to sit at the table when they make the distribution of nations and territories after the war? And so it would be foolish and impertinent on our side to ask the nations whose blood is being spilled for permission to send money into the land of their enemies in order to protect our own blood. Because 'rak b'dam tihyu lanu haaretz' ('only through blood will the land be ours'). As to yourselves -- members of the group -- 'atem taylu' ('you will get out'), and for this purpose we are providing you with funds by this courier." [22]

One might dismiss this cruel letter from Nathan Schwalb as an aberration, unrepresentative of the Zionist leadership at higher levels. But it turns out that Schwalb was acting in accordance with the views of his superiors in the Zionist movement. In his book, In Days of Holocaust and Destruction, Yitzchak Greenbaum, Chairman of the (Zionist) Jewish Agency's Rescue Committee in Jerusalem, wrote, "when they asked me, couldn't you give money out of the United Jewish Appeal funds for the rescue of Jews in Europe, I said, 'NO!' and I say again, 'NO!'...one should resist this wave which pushes the Zionist activities to secondary importance." In February, 1943, Greenbaum gave a speech in Tel Aviv on the subject, "The Diaspora and the Redemption" in which he said:

"When they come to us with two plans -- the rescue of the masses of Jews in Europe or the redemption of the land [settling Jews in Palestine -- JS] -- I vote, without a second thought, for the redemption of the land...If there would be a possibility today of buying packages of food with the money of the Keren Hayesod (United Jewish Appeal) to send it through Lisbon, would we do such a thing? No! and once again No!" [23]

 

1947-50

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Just after World War II many Jews were in Displaced Persons [DP] camps in Europe trying to make a new life for themselves somewhere where they could be safe. Conditions in the camps were so bad that survival itself was in question. Malnutrition and disease were severe, while shelter and heating in the winter were extremely inadequate. Making matters even worse for Jews was the fact that antisemitic German police raided the camps more and more frequently as local government was transferred by the Allies to Germans.

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As late as 1948 there were "between 100,000 and 114,000 displaced Jews in the American Zone of Germany. From among that group, more than 55,000 applications for emigration to the United States had been filed by the fall of 1947; and a majority of these people specified a preference of going anywhere but Palestine." About this time, Rabbi Klausner, a U.S. Army rabbi, gave a report about the Jews in the DP camps to "the Zionist-controlled American Jewish Conference" in which he stated:

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"I am convinced that the people must be forced to go to Palestine...By 'force' I suggest a program...The first step in such a program...is the adoption of the principle that it is the conviction of the world Jewish community that these people must go to Palestine...Those who are not interested are no longer to be wards of the Jewish community to be maintained in camps, fed and clothed without their having to make any contribution to their own subsistence. To effect this program, it becomes necessary for the Jewish community at large to reverse its policy and instead of creating comforts for the Displaced Persons to make them as uncomfortable as possible." [15]

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In 1948 the Zionist military force, the Haganah, tried to recruit Jewish DPs to go to Palestine and fight Arabs. At first they tried a voluntary recruitment drive, which was a failure, in part because "[T]he elevated tensions in the Arab-Jewish conflict increased doubts about 'aliyah [immigration to Palestine], and as a result, more camp dwellers distanced themselves from the Zionist movement, and became reluctant to be drafted or immigrate to Palestine." Yehuda Ben-David, the Haganah deputy commander in Germany, reported back to his superiors that "the Jews of the camps" were, themselves, the problem:  "Their acquaintance with Zionist values is limited and superficial." In Austria, the Zionist Gordonia-Young Maccabean youth movement was charged with recruiting  for the Haganah and they reported, "the mobilization operation among camp Jews is unsuccessful...There are some volunteers among the Romanian refugees...but for Polish Jews there is hardly any hope. The corruption of these Jews is so great that they are totally uninterested in the people's campaign [in Palestine]. Recently, the JDC [American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee] began registering people who would like to go to America, and hundreds of camp Jews have registered." [16]

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Next, the Haganah switched to a compulsory draft, which they were able to do because they had the backing of the Americans running the camps. In an operation that was "approved by Ben-Gurion" each camp's governing body  (known by their Yiddish name as the Zentral Komitet ) "used all the power it had: Employees were fired, residents were evicted from their apartments, others were fined or denied the supplementary food rations that the JDC was distributing to all camp Jews; others were simply beaten up...Violent incidents were numerous. The archives are replete with hundreds of official documents describing brutal methods and actions carried out in an identical manner in a large number of camps in Germany and Austria, taking place mostly between March and August 1948...The archives also contain testimony about 'waves of Zionist harassment' in the camps..." The compulsory conscription was a success, because in the conflict between the Zionists and "thousands of Displaced Persons who make immigration plans to target countries other than Palestine" there "could only be one winner -- the side capable of using institutional violence."  [17]

 

The Yiddish Bulletin on May 19, 1950 wrote:

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"By pressing for an exodus of Jews from Europe; by insisting that Jewish D.P.s do not wish to go to any country outside of Israel; by not participating in the negotiations on behalf of the D.P.'s; and by refraining from a campaign of their own -- by all this they [the Zionists] certainly did not help to open the gates of America for Jews. In fact, they sacrificed the interests of living people -- their brothers and sisters who went through a world of pain -- to the politics of their own movement." [18]

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Read here Morris L. Ernst's account of how FDR wanted to allow all the Jewish displaced persons in Europe to come live in the United States and when he asked Ernst to bring this offer to Zionist leaders the Zionist leaders opposed it totally and angrily.

 

Read Stanley Heller's "An Especially Shameful Episode in Zionist History" about how Zionist leaders collaborated with the Nazis.

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Read this review of Thomas Suarez's book, Palestine Hijacked, confirming the assertions I make above about Zionist leaders' contempt for the welfare of ordinary Jews. 

 

WHY, REALLY, DOES THE U.S. GOVERNMENT SUPPORT ISRAEL?

 

Read in "Why U.S. Billionaires Could Destroy the Israel Lobby, But Don't" how American billionaires (non-Jewish and Jewish alike!), far from being forced by the "Israel lobby," have a very real (though evil) self-interest in supporting Israel and do so for THAT reason, not because of any mysterious power of Jews to control non-Jews. U.S. billionaires support Israel because they benefit from Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians for the same reason that Israeli billionaires benefit from it: it does much of the heavy lifting to create the bogeyman enemy--for the "War on Terror"--that they use to control "their own" people--Americans. In fact, a single billionaire could destroy the Israel lobby (AIPAC) easily by just telling the American public the sordid truth about how Zionists have only contempt for ordinary Jews and betrayed them during the Holocaust years. Read "The Israel Lobby's Power Comes from The American Ruling Class."

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American billionaires use the U.S. government just like Israeli billionaires use the Israeli government, to attack Muslims in order to make them a useful bogeyman enemy. This is why the U.S. government attacked Muslims with drones, as I show in my article, "Drones Create Hatred of the U.S., Which Is Their Real Purpose." As Dave Stratman showed in his "Inventing the Enemy," it has been a long-standing policy of the U.S. ruling class to do whatever was necessary to make Islamic Fundamentalists play the role of bogeyman enemy (replacing Communism, the earlier bogeyman enemy, which the U.S. rulers also had to make scary by arming the Soviet Union big time during the Cold War.) Why?  "US rulers need to create a frightening, ubiquitous, and apparently powerful enemy against which to wage endless war." The same reason Israeli rulers treat Palestinians like dirt: to make them as angry at Israel and as frightening to Israeli Jews as possible.

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Read how ordinary Americans are harmed by Zionism too, in "Why Our Government Supports Israel's Government and Why We Shouldn't" (pdf)

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