ECONOMY-ISRAEL: Now to the Struggle Within

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, Jul 21 2003 (IPS) - Vicki Knafo began the 203-kilometre walk to Jerusalem two days after the state cut her monthly welfare benefits as a single mother by half.

By the time she walked into the city carrying an Israeli flag in mid-July, and accompanied by a band of supporters and an army of photographers and cameramen, she had become a symbol of the growing outrage against the government’s decision to slash welfare benefits as part of an austerity plan.

Knafo, whose monthly stipend has been cut from 570 dollars to 295 dollars, has pitched tent outside the Treasury office, and refuses to budge despite promises by finance minister Benjamin Netanyahu to help her and 100,000 single mothers like her.

Now others are following Knafo’s lead, setting off from their homes around the country on foot to Jerusalem. Every day, more and more begin the long-distance march.

Within a week of setting up home on Netanyahu’s office doorstep, Knafo has been joined by dozens of other single parents. Some 35 small tents now line the sidewalk outside the finance ministry. "Bibi go home, Knafo to the Treasury," reads one handwritten sign at the tent camp, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname. "We are ready to work, but there is no work," reads another.

Netanyahu has made promises, but no specific proposals. "I have met Netanyahu twice," Knafo, a divorced mother of three told IPS outside her tent. "He only wants to smooth-talk us."

The protest is the first real grassroots opposition to Netanyahu’s plan to revolutionise the Israeli economy, in part by drastically shrinking the public sector, including the type of social programmes that give assistance to single parents. The finance minister and his aides have been burning the midnight oil in desperate search for a formula that will get the single mothers to back down.

Netanyahu knows that many single parents are also hardcore supporters of his ruling Likud party. They have public backing: in a recent opinion poll, 68 percent of respondents said their protest was justified; only 24 percent said it was not.

In his bid to extinguish the protest, Netanyahu has also tried to portray single parents as hooked on welfare. "A woman can work in a factory," he said. "Someone who is able to walk 200 kilometres to Jerusalem is capable of doing this."

But Knafo does work, cooking food in kindergartens. And jobs are scarce. Unemployment is running at 10.8 percent nationally, and is even higher in the working class towns like the one where Knafo lives.

The protest has erupted now because the cuts in social benefits – decided on by Netanyahu’s predecessor but taken further by him – went into effect July 1. They are a part of a 2.3 billion dollar budget cut that the finance minister says is vital in extricating Israel from protracted recession. The country is "a few metres from the abyss," he says, and a cut in social benefits is crucial to rehabilitating an economy hit by the collapse of the high-tech market in 2000 and further battered by the Palestinian uprising.

It is no coincidence that Vicki Knafo began her long-distance march just as fighting between Israel and the Palestinians began to taper off as a result of the truce declared June 29 by militant Palestinian groups. "If there’s a terror attack, then we will no longer be in the headlines," Knafo concedes.

But social scientists say the real roots of Vicki Knafo’s protest can be traced back almost 30 years to a time when Israel was still the most egalitarian country in the developed world in terms of income distribution. Today, it has one of the biggest gaps between rich and poor among developed countries. The divide threatens Israel’s cohesion as a society.

Netanyahu, who served as prime minister from 1996-99, insists his policies will attract investment, spur growth and ultimately help the poor. His plan is to rid the economy of what he views as the suffocating vestiges of a socialist ethos. While cutting welfare, he has reduced the top income tax rate, revamped the pension system and is trying to accelerate privatisation of the banking system and telephone and electricity corporations.

"The country will undergo a short period of hardship as we decelerate from the old system, and then there will be a great spurt of growth," Netanyahu said in a recent interview.

A leading social activist says Netanyahu’s policies are the disastrous culmination of a long process of privatisation, and a steady erosion in education and infrastructure spending. "What we have been witnessing in Israel for a long time is the destruction of the welfare state and the growth of inequality," Dani Gutwein, a social activist and history lecturer at Haifa University told IPS.

Backed by the "capitalist elite", Gutwein says the finance minister has begun implementing measures reminiscent of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. "Netanyahu went with the logic that there wouldn’t be much resistance to his economic plan," he says. "He has also moved to try and break the unions by limiting their right to strike via legislation."

But the protesters, says Gutwein, are a new breed. "They are not the immigrant generation who arrived in this country, but the children of immigrants who were born here," he says. "They are self-confident, feel right at home and don’t hold the government in awe."

It is still too early, though, to determine whether a handful of single mothers can shake the government and derail its economic plan. Other groups affected by the cuts, like the elderly, immigrants and the unemployed, have not yet joined the march. And the single mothers cannot go on living in the small, cramped tents forever.

Knafo, who never expected her spontaneous march would amount to more than a one-person protest, knows what she is up against. "They think I am god," she says of the other women in the tent camp. "I am not god. But I am not giving up. War has been declared on us, and we plan to fight."