Directly and indirectly, out of this or that interest, innocently or otherwise, with the best of intentions, or the worst the Trajtenberg committee's recommendations have started to make their way to the dustbin of history. With so much detraction, disappointment, and opposition, most powerfully in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's own inner circle, why should he go out of his way to pass the recommendations as they stand?
In present circumstances, which are not entirely within our control, the committee's recommendations are the best thing there is. There are no better proposals around, nor will there be. That is on condition and this is the most important point that they are passed entire and unchanged by the government and the Knesset, and that implementation starts tomorrow morning, and is led by this prime minister and the next, and continues steadily, week after week, year after year.
But the signs are already there that it isn't going to happen. Not because of the protest leaders, whose negative, vaunting response was formulated a month before the committee presented its recommendations, but precisely because of those who ostensibly have supported and support social awareness and welfare, and with fine sounding words.
The most regrettable thing is that the person who has started the process of eating away at the proposals is Minister of Finance Yuval Steinitz. Yesterday, in "Yediot Ahronot", it emerged that he was "not happy" with the recommendations (we naively believed that it was a matter of correcting stark anomalies that Steinitz caused, not some kind of universal happiness that he dreams of). Our bi-annual budget finance minister has altogether different ideas. What are these billions that it is recommended should go to help parents with children up to age 9? What nonsense. Steinitz would have preferred "to give more to encourage employment of haredi men and Arab women, and to preserve the advantage of Israeli knowledge-based industries, and less to nationwide implementation of free education from age 3."
No-one in the country does not want to encourage employment of haredi men and Arab women, and to maintain our edge in high tech, but other ground is burning under our feet. It burns for middle-class families paying thousands of shekels a month for childcare. A year at kindergarten costs twice as much as a year at university. The way things are at the moment, the education of the next generation is the heart of the matter. That is what, over time, will make possible the employment of haredi men and Arab women, and knowledge-based industry as well. But Steinitz isn't happy, so he starts to nibble away. True, he says that, despite his reservations, he will vote for adoption of the Trajtenberg recommendations in principle, but pay attention to the phrasing: Steinitz talks of "approval in principle". That means that the great plastering over has started. That early education will go. It also means that the finance minister himself will lead his ministry in the work of drying up the finance required for implementing the education recommendations. Just as his predecessors have done, those who, year after year, erased (or in their words only "deferred") free education for young children, the long school day, and school meals, from the Economic Arrangements Law.
So why nevertheless vote for the "principle"? Perhaps because otherwise Netanyahu will remove him from his cabinet seat, and without Netanyahu, Steinitz has no visible means of political support.
If the finance minister was not sufficiently persuasive, and he was not, then he has more to add: promoting the recommendations of the committee for young children will not reduce inequality or poverty. Even if that is true now, this year, it is certainly not true for the future. Who should know better than Dr. Steinitz that education is what will reduce inequality and poverty? But perhaps what really bothers him is that some Trajtenberg comes along and slightly rearranges the building blocks at the sleepy, indifferent, and remote Ministry of Finance.
Bibi's friends
With friends like these… Netanyahu mutters to himself every morning. MK Moshe Gafni, United Torah Judaism, chairman of the Knesset Finance Committee, has already declared that "the haredim will not accept the Trajtenberg committee recommendations." Who knows better than him that, without happy and content haredim, there is no government? At the same time, he has invented his own little committee for himself, and is personally promoting a bill to reduce tax on the middle class, in despite of Trajtenberg, who stopped the tax reduction program in order to finance education. Then up pops MK Carmel Shama, Likud, chairman of the Knesset Economics Committee: "The committee's conclusions on housing range between irrelevance and disappointment…" Another headline scored.
Eli Yishai, head of Shas, the most social minded minister this country has known since he arrived on the scene in 1996 (how has poverty been doing since then, minister?) has another idea. "This is a partial report," he said yesterday. "It has nothing to say about the disadvantaged, those who can't even start the month… and there is nothing about public housing…" That must be Eli Yishai, chief rabbi of self righteousness, who has always concerned himself with the disadvantaged and public housing I wonder why no-one ever told us.
For dessert, for now, along comes the greatest of them all. Avigdor Liberman, chairman of Yisrael Beitenu and the flock of supporters who surround him. In the Sheshinski report affair, the party's women MKs took the lead against the recommendations. This time around, it's Stas Misezhnikov. He says he needs more time to study the material. A week isn't enough for him to read it. There was a holiday in the middle, and we thought he would read the papers, but apparently he was busy with something else. It's worth paying attention to the cunning wording of the letter he sent yesterday, Sunday, to cabinet secretary Zvi Hauser, in which he demanded, in the name of his boss, that the cabinet discussion scheduled for today should be postponed. "It is inconceivable, from a professional and practical point of view, to discuss and adopt a report of incomparable importance for Israel's economy and society with no time for preparation…" How serious…
And perhaps, "from a professional and practical point of view", it is not worthwhile for Netanyahu to get involved in all the Trajtenberg troubles. If the report is such a disappointment, why would an experienced politician like him want to disappoint everybody?
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on October 3, 2011
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