Unemployment: Israel's other existential threat (Haaretz - Israel News)
- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is apparently unperturbed, more concerned about the stability of his government coalition than anything else. He knows that to stop these dangerous processes he will have to take unprecedented measures that will not be popular.
First, the money flow must be stemmed to the independent schools systems run by the Shas and Agudat Yisrael parties and the Islamic Movement. Every child in Israel should be taught from the same curriculum based on core subjects like science, mathematics, English and history. Later on in the school day, each sector can teach its students what it likes.
Budgetary support for yeshivas must also be cut, and every ultra-Orthodox individual drafted to the military. They too should put their lives at risk; perhaps their worldview would change as a result. Military service would connect them to Israeli society and its problems, and raise the likelihood that they will turn into citizens who earn their own livelihoods.
Family allowances ought to be cut as well, starting with the fifth child. In most families with many children, each new birth automatically perpetuates the cycle of poverty. If parents want eight children, let them support their brood themselves. Of course, entering the workforce should also be encouraged by subsidizing public transportation, building day care centers, augmenting the Wisconsin welfare-to-work program and instituting a negative income tax.
In its 62nd year, Israel is in a diplomatic, security and moral limbo (Haaretz - Israel News)
- Unfortunately, Israel's 62nd Independence Day finds it in a kind of diplomatic, security and moral limbo that is certainly no cause for celebration. It is isolated globally and embroiled in a conflict with the superpower whose friendship and support are vital to its very existence. It is devoid of any diplomatic plan aside from holding onto the territories and afraid of any movement. It wallows in a sense of existential threat that has only grown with time. It seizes on every instance of anti-Semitism, whether real or imagined, as a pretext for continued apathy and passivity. In many respects, it seems that Israel has lost the dynamism and hope of its early decades, and is once again mired in the ghetto mentality against which its founders rebelled.
Granted, Israel is not the sole custodian of its fate. Yet the shortcomings that have cast a pall over the country since its founding - the ethnocentrism, the dominance of the army and religious functionaries, the socioeconomic gaps, the subservience to the settlers, the mystical mode of thinking and the adherence to false beliefs - have, instead of disappearing over time, only gathered steam. The optimistic, pragmatic, peace-seeking spirit that once filled the Israeli people, in tune with the Zionist revolution, which sought to alter Jewish fate, has weakened. And it is not clear whether the current government is deepening the reactionary counterrevolution or merely giving it faithful expression.
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