Der Jüdenstaat, Theodore Herzl’s magnum opus, set out his vision for the Jewish State. He can be forgiven for failing to envisage, in 1894, either its name, Israel, or its predominant language, Hebrew
HOWARD EPSTEIN – THE STATE OF THE JEWISH STATE
Der Jüdenstaat, Theodore Herzl’s magnum opus, set out his vision for the Jewish State. He can be forgiven for failing to envisage, in 1894, either its name, Israel, or its predominant language, Hebrew. For the latter we can thank Eliezer Ben‑Yehuda, who had arrived in the Holy Land only three years before Der Jüdenstaat was published, with a self-conceived mission to revive Hebrew as an everyday language, thereby delivering us from the dead-weight of German, that Herzl foresaw as our national language. (Would that they could have shared their equally-ambitious plans with one another….)
As a blueprint for Jewish rebirth and survival, it is not surprising that Der Jüdenstaat is more about politics than everyday life, which Herzl could have been forgiven for failing to foretell; yet the opposite is the case, for he concludes his work thus:-
Therefore I believe that a wondrous generation of Jews will spring into existence. The Maccabeans will rise again. Let me repeat once more my opening words: The Jews who wish for a State will have it. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes. The world will be freed by our liberty, enriched by our wealth, magnified by our greatness. And whatever we attempt there to accomplish for our own welfare, will react powerfully and beneficially for the good of humanity.
which, as a piece of prophetic writing, has an almost biblical quality about it.
Discussions, polemics and philosophizing (not to mention the resistance, denials and threats from our would-be usurpers) about the concept of Israel as a Jewish State are almost always about politics and security. Herzl’s reference to the Maccabeans fits that mold, too; but there should be, and there is, more than that to Israel as a Jewish State. Herzl uses one word in the above extract that, dull as it may appear at first sight, should excite our interest: welfare. Welfare today means social security and social services: health-care accessible to all, adequate pension arrangements for the elderly and sufficient financial support for the unemployed, the poor and the disabled.
All this is rooted in Jewish tradition. The Prophets exhorted us to lead a righteous life by assisting the needy, and by showing beneficence to and compassion for the weak and distressed. Pirkei Avot tells us: “The world rests upon three things: the Torah, service to God, and loving-kindness”, this last, chesed, being regarded as a core Jewish moral virtue.
Does Israel, the Jewish State, have pretensions to being a welfare state? Professor John Gal, Chair of the Social Welfare Policy program and a Senior Researcher at the Taub Center, Jerusalem, has little doubt that it does, and not merely pretentiously. In Immigration and the Categorical Welfare State in Israel (2008), he writes[1]:
[Israel] is a democratic society with a highly developed market economy and a relatively comprehensive social welfare system. … Israel’s expenditure on social welfare comprised 16.2 percent of its gross domestic product in 2005 (National Insurance Institute 2007). This places it at the lower end of the spending scale among welfare states. Israel’s social welfare spending is still higher than that of the United States and several other welfare states. [My emphasis, here and below.]
….
The social welfare system in Israel is relatively comprehensive. It was first established in the early 1950s, a few short years after the creation of the state. It relies on the [British] model proposed by William Beveridge (1942). The model envisions a universalistic welfare state that is comprised primarily of social insurance programs. …
So far, so good. The welfare state was clearly well-established here by 2008. But that was nearly ten years ago. Has it been keeping up? According to the OECD’s latest Economic Survey of Israel[2], published last month:-
Israel’s economy has strong fundamentals, but the country needs to address productivity, inequality and poverty if it wants to improve well-being and reduce socio-economic divides.
At the same time, the OECD released a study entitled Measuring and Assessing Well-Being in Israel[3], which asserts:-
… while Israel performs well and is among the best in the OECD in terms of life satisfaction, health status and educational attainment, it has poor outcomes compared to OECD averages in areas such as poverty, housing and air quality. Additionally, Israel has a high level of inequality, with the Israeli Arab and Haredi populations experiencing higher than average rates of poverty, and lower levels of labour force participation and educational attainment than is the case for secular Jews. This contributes to overall levels of human capital in Israel which are significantly below the OECD average.
….
Poverty is especially high among the elderly in Israel, in part because of low basic pensions. … Rising house prices impose an additional affordability burden, increasingly even on the middle class.
Those given special mention are minority groups, the Arabs and the charedim (whose interests should not be diluted by what follows). The elephant in the room is “ordinary” Israelis, equivalent to what the benighted Richard Nixon called the silent majority. They are amcha, the grassroots of our society; Ashkenazim and Sephardim; young, middle-aged and seniors; the unemployed and working people; you and me – but maybe in less fortunate circumstances.
Some people need extra assistance and that is a main purpose of a properly-functioning welfare state. Often, here in the Jewish State, they and their families suffer from the main bread-winner being employed but badly under-paid, and all too often exploited. They may work in some fat-cat protected industry that serves the owners and senior managers outrageously well and the workers outrageously badly. In too many cases, there will be a mogul-oligarch controlling an indecently large portion (up to 100% in some cases) of a sector of our economy, with an overweening desire to extract maximum effort for minimum pay. In other cases, all too often such a boss is the proprietor of an SME[4], who thinks his family’s lifestyle takes absolute precedence over that of other Jewish families, those of his employees in regard to whom he stands in a position of some responsibility, but with an insouciance that borders on the immoral. Such employers – and there are many of them, too many of them, in Israel – certainly ignore that fundamental ethic of a Jewish State: chesed, or, to put it colloquially, care for one’s fellow Israeli.
The average Israeli worker has too few holidays, is almost never allowed a lunch-break, and has to fight to get a living wage. Far too many employers see their primary goal as pegging salaries as closely as possible to the average wage, which is modest enough – not even NIS10,000 per month “brutto” in 2015, actually averaging NIS9,585 monthly last year, as revealed by this chart[5]:-
which is NIS115,025 pa (around US$31,000 pa or GB£21,000 pa) before deductions for income tax and National Insurance contributions. Small wonder then that some 10% of Israelis have chosen to work and live outside Israel. That still leaves over 7 million here, some of whom are doing very nicely indeed, especially if their company’s profits are under-pinned with a cheap salaries item on the profit and loss account.
Moving around the bubble that is Greater Tel Aviv, the successful and privileged feel too elevated to see the ordinary man. They enjoy the fruits of a winning economy (built partly on exploitation of the under-paid), the protection conferred by the State, safe streets (if not safe roads!), and an enviable life-style, what with the usually-fine weather, the fresh wholesome food, excellent wines, world-class restaurants and good quality clothes, now available here without having to fly to Europe. All very fine, if you can afford it.
There has to be, and there certainly should be, for the more successful members of society in the Jewish State, in return for all these blessings, a concomitant price: chesed. Do they think that societal weakness is some-one else’s problem? A little like the vibrations under-foot in homes far from Tel Aviv, near the border with Gaza? Ask not for whom the ground shudders, it shudders for thee. An exploited work-force is not just its problem but yours and mine too -everyone’s potential nemesis. The wealth gap in Israel is one of the widest in the developed world, and it stores up trouble for the future. It is said that a lack of compassion marks one out as cruel, and cruelty has a way of coming back to haunt the oppressor.
It may have been questionable for students, a few summers back, to protest that they could not afford metropolitan rental costs. (When could they ever? And now that every major city suffers from the free movement of capital that comes with globalization, Tel Aviv is merely typical.) There is, however, a subject for protest and demonstration that we should all be supporting: one that seeks to level the playing field, close up the wealth gap and give succor where it is most needed – and not least because Israel is a Jewish State. How is this to be achieved? For what practical measures should we be remonstrating?
Certainly an intelligent tax system can help, but ever-higher taxation is no panacea, because it eventually becomes regressive. There are other solutions. Owners of companies should be encouraged to incentivize their less well-paid workers with salaries that imply worth and value, and satisfy decency. Bosses should be restricted in their earnings to a certain multiple of the average salary of their employees, with the excess redistributed in employee dividends. There should be European-style employment protection, and a workers’ charter that stipulates: everyone is entitled to take an hour out for lunch; and the working day stops at the contractually-agreed hour, not when the boss thinks he has extracted that day’s pound of flesh. (In all these regards, Israel is many years behind the European and Anglo-Saxon countries of the OECD.) People should be exhorted to give generously to certain charities, recognized as well-run. The exceptionally wealthy should be encouraged to follow the paradigm established by Warren Buffet and Bill Gates: give away large parts of excessive fortunes that will never otherwise be spent.
Legislation should be reinforced by media campaigns, ranging from the subliminal to the hard-hitting. They have worked to some extent here (perhaps more so in the UK) and they need to be extended so that peer pressure, as a result of media messaging portraying certain activities as anti-social, completes the process.
Do you think my solutions inadequate? They could well be. But the OECD placed both its reports literally into the hands of the Prime Minister of the Jewish State. Let us see what his teams of experts come up with – but let them only do so quickly, for our brethren are suffering.
Howard Epstein, LLB, is an English commercial lawyer of some 45 years’ standing. He still practices international commercial litigation on several continents. As such, he is articulate and voluble.
Howard is also a staunch Zionist, having achieved aliyah in September 2005, after a lifetime as “an armchair Zionist”. His parents met at a Habonim function and he was raised with Zionism on a daily basis. He is well-read, knowledgeable and opinionated about Jewish and Israeli history and current affairs.
© Howard Epstein 2016
[1] Immigration and the Categorical Welfare State in Israel – Social Service Review (December 2008) The University of Chicago. – http://law.huji.ac.il/upload/Gal_-_Immigration.pdf
[2] http://www.oecd.org/israel/economic-survey-israel.htm
[3] http://www.oecd.org/israel/measuring-and-assessing-well-being-in-israel-9789264246034-en.htm
[4] SME: small- or medium-sized enterprize.
[5] The Central Bureau of Statistics: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/israel/wages
