Fixing Israel’s Economy

Michael Sarel, who recently stepped down as chief economist at Israel’s Treasury Ministry, speaks about the challenges facing Israel’s economy, the political roadblocks that prevent improvements, and the dangers of over-regulation. (Interview by Amnon Lord and Akiva Bigman)

The populism contest [among politicians] is the primary obstacle to a fundamental improvement in Israel’s economic situation. According to Dr. Sarel, since the days of Netanyahu’s reforms in 2003-2005 when he served as Treasury Minister, Israel has not had an economic policy that deals with fundamentally changing the situation but only one dealing with the symptoms of the present one. “Very often, there are very attractive ideas which ostensibly deal with the problems in the economy,” he says, “and they have good visibility. On the macro level they seem to solve the problems, but when you properly examine these cures, you understand that the negative results are greater than the positive ones.”

Read more at Mida

More about: Economics, Free market, Israeli economy, Israeli politics, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society