Gap Between Rich and Poor Spurs Israel’s War on Poverty

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had just walked through the rotting slums of south Tel Aviv and was shaken by the poverty, disease, crime, drug use and sheer anger he had encountered.

“There were moments during my tour when I didn’t know whether I was in Tel Aviv, Khan Yunis (in the Gaza Strip) or the Jabaliya refugee camp,” Rabin recounted later. “It was appalling. It has been 20 years since any new housing was built in those underprivileged neighborhoods--all the budget has gone to the (occupied) territories.”

Elected as much to reverse Israel’s economic fortunes as to bring peace, the Rabin government pledged that there would be new priorities in state spending and that life would get better, and quickly so, for the country’s poor.

After a year and a half in office, it is finding itself harshly judged on those commitments--not only by the poor and unemployed but also by influential members of Rabin’s own Labor Party, who are pushing hard for more money for social needs.

Unemployment has dropped a percentage point to 10.3%, but only because immigration has declined, and it remains at twice the level to which Israelis are accustomed. Inflation has crept up again to 11%.

The gap between rich and poor--a very sensitive issue among egalitarian Israelis--has widened. And the homeless men and women of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Beersheba are increasing day by day.

“There have been tremendous changes for the better in the past year,” Economics Minister Shimon Shetreet said in an interview, ticking off the creation of 93,000 jobs, a 17% increase in highly profitable exports and more state money for education, highways, construction and development. “But people expected more, much more.”

Like Rabin’s tour of Tel Aviv slums early this year, the latest figures on Israeli poverty are alarming. Yossi Tamir, director general of the National Insurance Institute, which pays out virtually all family, old age, welfare and unemployment benefits, reported this month that 17% of Israeli families--174,000 households at the end of last year--fall below the poverty line, up from 15% a year earlier.

The “poverty line” is defined in Israel as applying to an individual with an income of less than the equivalent of $265 a month or a couple with three children with a monthly income of less than $790. By law, the minimum monthly wage is $465, but thousands work for less just to get a job.

“Many people take home less than 300 shekels ($100) a week and feel themselves lucky to have that,” Labor Minister Ora Namir said recently. “We have large segments of our population living not just at the subsistence level but just above starvation level.”

Breaking the overall poverty figure into categories, the insurance institute calculated that 36% of the country’s elderly, 36% of large families and 30% of new immigrants have incomes less than needed for bare essentials.

Turned around, the figures showed that 56% of heads of families below the poverty line are unemployed and that 75% of all unemployed have been without work for more than six months.

The growth of Israeli poverty has major political implications for Rabin, the Labor Party and the next elections--and for Israel’s peace negotiations with its Arab neighbors.

Labor won the June, 1992, parliamentary elections with a three-pronged strategy--promises to bring peace, to reduce unemployment and to improve the quality of life, particularly in education, housing, health care, employment and inflation.

“Each commitment supported the others, and together they produced our majority,” a Rabin adviser said. “Now, we appear to many to be abandoning them and their needs, and you can be sure they will abandon us on peace. Let me be plain: We could easily lose the broad support we need on peace agreements with the Palestinians, with the Syrians, with whomever because we have not delivered on job creation, on tax cuts, on better education and health care, on things that matter in daily life.”