“For middle-class Israelis to care, the message from the state should be quite different — one that could be called compassionate cruelty. The state should be telling its citizens: We don’t much care if the poor-by-choice get even poorer and get even less from the state. We don’t much care about poverty rates that take everybody into account without much consideration of personal and communal decisions and their consequences. But we will ensure that those willing to work and pay their dues [and their taxes] are properly assisted, and the government will make sure that they are the only ones to be raised above poverty level on the government’s dime.”
Writing in the New York Times under the headline "Israel's Undeserving Poor," Shmuel Rosner – a former Ha'aretz and Jerusalem Post reporter and columnist who is now the political editor for LA The Jewish Journal and a fellow at The Jewish People Policy Institute – argues that the large gap between the haves and have nots in Israel is due in part to the perception the haves have of the poor.
That perception, Rosner argues, is heavily colored by willful poverty, by the haredim who willfully choose not to work and by Arabs who do a version of the same. (With haredim, the choice not to work is made by men who instead choose to collect various welfare payments and study full time in yeshivas well into middle age – and, increasingly, for an entire lifetime. For Arabs, men work but women are forced to stay home and care for large families. Both haredim and Arabs have very high birthrates, as well.)
Israel’s middle class, Rosner says, also knows that “to be blunt…Haredis and Arabs are disproportionately represented in the underground economy (namely, by evading taxes).”
Put even more bluntly than Rosner, middle class Israelis are sick and tired of being gamed by draft-dodging, tax-evading, freeloaders, and as long a a big chunk of Israel’s poor arguably fits that description, Israelis who are not poor will do very little to combat or alleviate real poverty.
That’s because the reality is that money meant to help the "legitimately poor’ gets sucked up by the ‘willfully poor’ – mostly the haredi ‘willfully poor’ – and that leaves the ‘legitimately poor’ in extremely dire straits.
It isn’t as if Bnei Brak and Northern Jerusalem are full of haredi welfare queens, but their poverty – bad as it is – is softened by their leaders manipulation of the state system. Most haredi poor are actually poor and really do suffer. They just suffer somewhat less than poor non-haredim, and their suffering is a suffering of choice, of bad choices made at the behest of their often corrupt rabbis. And those poor choices by haredim deepen the poverty and increase the suffering of truly poor non-haredi Israelis who have fallen into poverty due to illness, age, addiction or horrible bad luck.
Rosner argues the government has to change its message and crack down even harder on those who willfully choose not to work in order to be able to help those others.
“For middle-class Israelis to care, the message from the state should be quite different — one that could be called compassionate cruelty. The state should be telling its citizens: We don’t much care if the poor-by-choice get even poorer and get even less from the state. We don’t much care about poverty rates that take everybody into account without much consideration of personal and communal decisions and their consequences. But we will ensure that those willing to work and pay their dues [and their taxes] are properly assisted, and the government will make sure that they are the only ones to be raised above poverty level on the government’s dime.”
Will this ever happen?
Arguably, if it does it will happen too late, when the haredi community has already grown exponentially larger.
Haredi leaders hope to win this fight by having haredim out birth non-haredim, by haredim having enough children to become the Israeli majority, something they are on track to achieve by mid-century – in large part due to the welfare and subsidies the government pays them.
If Israel does not act now it may be too late to save the country from financial ruin and, even more frighteningly, a war launched by its enemies that it will no longer have the strength to win.
In other words, it can be argued that Israel's current policy toward haredim poses an existential threat to Israel's own survival, and that there really is no more time left to wait.