For the majority of Israelis, the wave of price hikes is not a minor thing. When taking into account the half of all working Israelis who earn less than NIS 6,000 ($1,870) a month, the hundreds of thousands with disabilities, the more than one million elderly, and unemployment that has yet to return to pre-COVID levels – most people are in trouble. Adding hundreds of shekels to our monthly budget will sentence many of us to overdraft, perpetual debt, loans and the gray market.
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The government's vacillation on this issue is embarrassing. This is an ongoing problem that places Israel at the top of Western countries in terms of basic existence goods and impossible housing costs. None of this will be resolved with a celebrity boycott of Osem pasta.
An emergency situation necessitates quick and serious action. The government's most pressing task is to build an iron wall to protect the poor. When Israel is the champion of the Western world in the proportion of workers below the poverty line, and the finance minister proposes increasing the minimum wage by half a shekel, it's a bad joke. The "Standing Together" NGO's "40 minimum" campaign is a step in the right direction and a central component of the iron wall's foundations. It's important to remember that we are also workers, not just consumers. A situation in which a job cannot pull one out of poverty in Israel is disgraceful and requires immediate amendment.
Israel also "excels" at handing out the lowest living stipends in the West. Instead of protecting the tens of thousands of people who rely on a guaranteed minimum income and increasing it significantly, the Finance Ministry protects the most basic living stipend for a couple at a cost of NIS 2,497 ($780) per month. Can anyone even start the month with such a sum? Can they pay for housing, food, gas, electricity, and water? Not to mention such "luxuries" as communication, education, and culture. The second component of the iron wall needs to be updating and increasing the basic living stipend, including disability, elderly, and food stipends from Social Security.
The price hikes also exposed the massive profits of the supermarket chains, which have exploited the COVID crises to increase their profits and dole out obscene salaries to the owners and executives. Everyone reveals their true face in a crisis. This is an opportunity to legislate a maximum salary law and address the greed that allows these owners and CEOs to make 100 times their low-level employees. It was people like this who caused the fall of the Second Temple.
The iron wall must also include oversight on basic goods. It has been proven countless times that opening the market to imports and slogans in the vein of "competition" end up harming the workers and boosting profits for the chains. A free market is important, but basic sustenance needד to be kept outside the bounds of unfair and sophisticated competition. Baby food, whole wheat bread, olive oil, and other basic goods must be accessible to us all. Housing, too, is a basic right, which in Israel has become a distant dream.
Basic sustenance also included education and health. In Israel, "free education" costs thousands of shekels. Public health costs thousands of shekels in private insurance. The Israeli public has doubled what it pays for private health insurance over the past decade. Investment in robust and real public health and education infrastructure can reduce the cost of living in Israel, because not everything starts and ends at the supermarket.
The government's project to build an economic iron wall is a necessity of the reality afflicting us all. And the sooner it gets to work, the better.
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