JERUSALEM - A government-appointed committee on socioeconomic change, set up in the wake of the social protests that swept Israel during the summer, proposed new policies yesterday designed to ease the high cost of living.
Related: I Was Wrong About Israel Protest Coverage
Israelis take to streets for 4th week of protests
And they have continued ever since; it is only the AmeriKan media that is ignoring them (sound familiar?).
The plan would cost an estimated $8 billion over five years, to be financed partly by cuts to the defense budget.
Manuel Trajtenberg, a respected professor of economics at Tel Aviv University who led the committee over its seven weeks of work, presented its recommendations to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and then to the public in a televised news conference.
Trajtenberg, who described the summer’s social protest movement as authentic, said the committee tried to lay the foundation for a more just society.
Despite the continuing threats against Israel, he said, “social security is no less important than physical security,’’ adding that it was necessary to find a new balance between those two factors. The fruits of Israel’s economic growth, he said, should be more evenly shared.
The committee’s recommendations include the construction of almost 200,000 apartments over the next five years, the availability of more apartments for rent, and an increase in housing subsidies for the needy.
More apartment construction?
The panel also recommended raising taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, and it called for free education for children starting at age 3 - it now begins at age 5 - and for the construction of more day-care centers.
But critics said the proposals just moved money around within the existing budget framework and did not present any drastic change to the system.
The protest movement’s grass-roots leaders, some of whom rejected the Trajtenberg committee from the outset as a fig leaf for the government’s shortcomings, said they would put forward alternative ideas today. The social movement began in mid-July when a group of young Israelis pitched tents in the center of Tel Aviv to protest the inflated price of housing....
Occupy Tel Aviv.
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And yet we are told Israelis are happy as s***?
"Poll finds an Israeli contradiction; Skeptical of peace; content with life" September 29, 2011|By Ethan Bronner, New York Times
JERUSALEM - With the start of the Jewish New Year at sunset last night, a traditional time for taking stock in Israel, the public mood seemed paradoxical: a growing disillusionment with the prospect of Middle East peace yet a marked sense of satisfaction with life here.
I'm sorry, readers, but I simply can no longer believe polls cited by the Zionist prism I call a paper.
That gap, reflected and discussed in media commentaries, was evident in a survey of Israeli Jews published yesterday in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot. Two thirds of the survey’s respondents said there was no chance - ever - of achieving peace with the Palestinians. But asked whether Israel was a good place to live, 88 percent said yes....
So says my paper, brought to me by....
Pro-Israel Americans:Help keep Israel secure by ensuring U.S. support remains strong www.AIPAC.org
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