Excessive regulation, rising food prices, high taxes, and government waste threaten the stability of Israel’s economy. Yair Lapid, the outgoing Treasury Minister, rode into office promising to ameliorate these problems; instead, he wasted political capital on reforms that could not make it through the Knesset, accomplished little, or were simply counterproductive—leaving the Israeli economy in worse condition, according to Shoham Wexler, than it was two years ago:

The tax burden is scaring away investors and leaving the private sector in the lurch, which has already been buried under the weight of taxes and regulation. As Treasury Minister, Lapid wasted hundreds of billions of our taxpayer dollars. Rather than invest the money in reducing the tax burden on businesses, the stock market, and companies, and providing credit for small businesses, Lapid preferred to invest the money through the public sector. The enormous budgets of the Transportation Ministry continued to become more bloated, and the same is true for the boondoggles of Education Ministry reform and the government companies.

Lapid is a grave disappointment with zigzags, unsuccessful reforms. The Treasury Minister who declared “I am not a socialist” failed to understand the important principle of capitalism: entrepreneurship. Rather than encourage it, he crushed it. Rather than release the public’s money back to the public by reducing taxes and government intervention, he increased government involvement in the economy, dissuading both investors and consumers from increasing their activity.

Let’s turn now to one of the more minor—but most telling—stories of the past few days: a small group of Western activists who traveled from Egypt hoping to journey across the border to Rafah to aid Palestinians there. In one of the many ironies of this mission, it may be the residents of Rafah who, despite the destruction of their city, may be least in need of rescuing, as the IDF has largely driven out Hamas there. Brendan O’Neill comments:

These valiant few from the US, the UK, Ireland and elsewhere . . . came unstuck in Egypt, where instead of welcoming these fearless foreign liberators of the benighted Arabs, local folk ridiculed them, pelted them with plastic bottles, and roundly told them to f— off.

Sadly, by which I mean hilariously, their cloying pity for Arabs crashed against the reality of Arab self-respect. I am still not recovered from the sight of these self-loving mid-wits in their culturally appropriated keffiyehs being shouted down by Egyptians. On the road to Ismailia in northern Egypt, the marchers were stopped by security forces. So they gathered in a square by the mosque and chanted “Free, free Palestine!” Locals weren’t best pleased. . . . Some of the marchers were arrested.

Many can now see that the aim of this activism is not to feed people in Gaza but to feed the vanity of Westerners bored with their privileged lives. It’s an orgy of Orientalism in which the activist class cosplays as Arabs because they think it’s lame and shameful to be white.