The State of
Israel is up in arms and everyone is protesting: Doctors,
anarchists, homeless, renters who would like to be home-owners,
parents, teachers, taxi drivers and more. Some of the protests are
real, some are fake, some are authentic, while others hide a
different agenda behind their protest signs. It's a mixed and very
confusing bag of events that has broken out in our summer heat and
it is rocking our government.
It is difficult to sort out what is true and what is false. On the
one hand, we all feel economic pressure. Whoever is getting married
and looking for a place to live or whose children are doing so knows
that this is an impossible situation. More than 120 average salaries
are required to buy a reasonable apartment within a reasonable
driving distance from Israel's center, where most jobs are located.
Our parents in the 1950's and 60's needed only half this sum to buy
a home that they could call their own. Then, they worked eight hours
a day, came home when the children were still awake and managed to
cover their expenses with their salaries.
Today? Who works only eight hours? And who manages to save even one
shekel by the end of the month? A family of seven that eats only the
very simplest of food cannot get by without a food bill of thousands
of shekels, to which they must add their expenses for tuition,
transportation, housing etc.
There is no doubt about it; the pressure is real.
On the other hand, Israel's economy is flourishing, and we all feel
it. All of us - not only the wealthy. The cafés are packed to the
brim. Tens of thousands of Israelis are vacationing this summer
overseas. New cars are jamming our highways.
How can we explain this dissonance? Let us begin to peel off the
layers of the onion.
First of all, we will remove the first layer; the layer of the
protest "leaders". It is actually quite easy to understand what is
happening at the protest camps. Someone in the most radical Left
understood that they have no chance to win a direct ideological
debate with the Right. So they chose a more sophisticated tactic and
wrapped their political/ideological agenda around genuine distress,
channeling it to undermine the government.
Financial backing from Israel's enemies through the good offices of
the New Israel Fund together with generous aid from Israel's media
came together to create a huge gust in the sails of the anarchists
who suddenly sprang up as authentic street leaders. At first, they
enjoyed public approval, but after a few days, when the leaders of
the struggle were pressed to logically formulate their demands, they
were revealed in all their delinquency and the public got the
picture.
So now we are left with the real issue minus the smokescreen. Are
things good? Or are they bad? Israel's economy is excellent, no
question about it. Technically, its citizens should be in a
reasonable economic state. But the unease is genuine.
There are islands of lack of competition that have raised prices of
certain commodities. The housing shortage is the result of the
almost complete monopoly that the State enjoys, holding 93% of the
land in the country. Another factor is the building freeze in Judea
and Samaria. An amazing fact that has not been getting much
publicity is that most of the land marketed in Israel comes from the
7% that is in private hands. In other words, the State has a
built-in interest not to market its land, and to profit from the
rise in land prices. The main share of the price of a new apartment
is the price of the land. In this way, home-owning hopefuls have
become a golden goose for Israel's Treasury. The high cost of food
is also the result of hidden monopolies. Paving the way for more
imports will lower the prices in no time.
That being said, the root of the distress and the protest is much
deeper. In order to relieve the distress, we must enlist standards
that are much different than the economic standards with which we
are familiar today.
The first standard that we must enlist is the equality index.
Our Sages teach us that if a wealthy person is accustomed to
servants who run before his carriage, the greater community must
supply him with this level of comfort even if he has lost his
wealth. This is the level of loving kindness that we must provide
for him.
In other words, there are objective and subjective standards. In
other times, nobody would complain about the economic conditions
that we are experiencing today. But today, the model for comparison
is not a tent in a refugee town, but rather a villa with all the
modern comforts to which we have been accustomed. The lack of
equality between those who can afford that standard of living and
those who cannot creates hard feelings that turn into public
protests.
The hard feelings are intensified by the ever-increasing salary gap.
It is one thing to live on 5,000 shekels a month. But to live on
that salary when others in society are paid ten times that amount -
is something else altogether.
Another standard that we will have to enlist to understand the
distress is the liberty index. When a person works 14 hours a day
and never knows how long he will be kept on the payroll, it doesn't
make much difference how much he earns. One way or another, he no
longer enjoys liberty. He has become a modern slave.
These two standards; equality and liberty, are really in our own
hands. We decide which societal model we would like to emulate. We
also decide how much of our liberty we are willing to forgo in order
to enjoy the standard of living that we have decided to emulate. To
put it simply, the 'social uprising' is really against ourselves.
But it is not that simple. Man is a social animal. Very few people
are capable of living with independent standards in a society that
holds other standards dear.
The problem, then, is social or on a deeper level, ideological. The
State of Israel was founded on the coattails of socialism and until
the middle of the 1980's was mired in its culture of robbery.
Israel's citizens would hide their wealth (a.k.a. "the under the
floor tile savings plan") and would be embarrassed by their economic
success. The work culture was based on lethargy; one's connections
to officialdom were much more important than entrepreneurship,
industriousness and education. The national debt, inflation,
unemployment, gross national product and every other index responded
in kind. Israel was a state on crutches.
The fall of the Communist bloc raised the banner of free-market
capitalism and sent a vast human treasure of industrious and
educated new citizens into Israel. High-tech, well-suited to Jewish
genius and the problem of marketing Israeli end-products in the
world was the perfect solution and Israel has become a true
high-tech superpower.
But this was the beginning of the downfall that has led to the
social uprising that we are now experiencing. Our newfound wealth
has no support system in Israeli culture; no deep tradition of faith
and loving kindness that could refine, restrain and above all - give
direction and a goal for all the energies bursting forth.
When a nation has no national vision, it begins to fray. With no
clear cultural roadmap, the economic turnabout brought about a
turnabout in social norms. The concealment of wealth from the
exploitation of the socialist establishment was a bad situation, but
it did create fertile ground for values like modest-living and
making do with very little. The surge of the pendulum to the free
market also trampled those positive elements. The free market
Israeli capitalism unleashed a culture of competitive
ostentatiousness. People began to spend more money than they could
really afford. If in the past, Israelis were embarrassed by what
they could afford, today they take pride in their acquisitions -
even though they cannot afford them.
Israeli society has become captive to a culture that, behind the
smokescreen of freedom, negates our liberty. It is easy to be
confused by the two terms. But in their essence, they are mutually
exclusive. Liberty means taking responsibility, while freedom means
absolving oneself of responsibility. The culture that developed with
the new capitalism included a highly visible element of voracious
freedom; a dimension of "grab what you can and don't be responsible
for anything but yourself - if anything at all."
The culture of freedom that relinquishes responsibility and by
default, liberty, has led us to a serious deterioration of human
rights. We prefer to get more and more freedom in exchange for ever
greater sacrifices of our liberty. We prefer to cast our basic
responsibilities on the State. "Let the State take responsibility
for our children," one of the leaders of the parent's protest said
last week.
Police brutality toward demonstrators has intensified and become
more violent. Policemen in masks - a blatant characteristic of
totalitarian regimes previously unseen here, black uniforms,
policemen who are no longer policemen but rather, fighters are now a
common sight: Who exactly is their enemy?
Wholesale eavesdropping on citizens has become routine. The
biometric law that labels citizens as if they were cattle has passed
its first reading in the Knesset. Why does it matter? After all,
with all our modern technology that has brought us so much freedom
to talk, text and to be in contact from anywhere to anywhere - we
are all transparent anyway. Who will dare relinquish all of this
freedom in exchange for an undefined piece of liberty?
Liberty is quite evasive. It is easy to lose it without even
noticing. Then, in the protest tents, they can't figure out how to
formulate a list of demands because they do not understand the root
of their distress. They do not know what they want, because a person
wants to live and there is no life without liberty.
Paradoxically, we are experiencing quite a lot of aspects of
Orwell's 1984 - from within a capitalistic regime. Even Orwell
couldn't have come up with that: cultural tyranny without a tyrant;
the loss of liberty from the midst of wealth and economic growth as
a cultural process that has no address other than us.
When a family goes out for the evening to the shopping mall, they
are actually designating consumerism as their culture. It is not
unusual to spot couples with small children strolling through the
malls at ten o' clock at night. That is the only time that they have
to spend with their children after a work day much longer than eight
hours. Now they are going to spend the money that they earned at the
price of their liberty, exchanging it for more material success that
the culture of consumerism forces upon them. Do they enjoy liberty?
Or are they slaves?
Do not be mistaken. The tycoon who owns the mall is drowning in the
very same swamp. He has not worked any less than the butterflies
that have been captured in the net that he suspended between his
dazzling storefronts. He is also caught up in unrelenting,
impossible competition and is captive to the method and the culture
no less than the smallest of his consumers.
Now we must return the baby that we threw out with the polluted
Socialist bathwater back into the tub.
Socialism is a sophisticated form of robbery. If it is fine to rob
the wealthy because he has wealth, then once the moral dam is
broken, the immorality will not stop with a particular person. In no
time, the rich layer of society is erased and the same method is
applied to the next layer. Before you know it, it also reaches you.
And you thought that you would be able to enjoy the spoils.
When the method reaches the back lines, it begins to take much more
than money. Because if a person thinks that it is fine to take
another person's money, he will ultimately allow himself to take his
life. Property rights are not a luxury - they define us as humans;
they are one of the foundations that make a person, whom it is
prohibited to slaughter, more than an animal, which we are allowed
to slaughter. All the absolute socialist regimes eventually
perpetrated mass murder of their own nation. Liberty is the
foundation of human life. Loss of liberty precedes its loss.
There is no economic method other than free economy. The problem is
not with free economy, but rather with the culture that encases it.
It is not capitalism that negated our liberty, but rather the
hedonistic culture that came with it.
Solidarity, loving kindness, modesty, personal example, respect for
others, education: How will we establish a culture that highlights
all of these while restraining, refining and directing the wealth
that has become our lot?
We have no culture other than our Jewish culture. Israel's economic
system must be a triangle: its base is capitalistic liberty and its
sides are Jewish faith and loving kindness. There, in the triangle,
we can find the answer to the distress that has bubbled over the
surface in Israel this summer.
http://www.jewishisrael.org/eng_contents/articles/71/articleA7112.html
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