The Double Daddy Daycare Disgrace

It's disingenuous and diabolical

The latest charedi army/money scandal in Israel revolves around daycare.

Israel subsidizes daycare for many families. The goal and financial sense of this is to encourage workforce participation and economic development. Accordingly, it is only granted to couples in which both parents either work or are studying towards gainful employment. If the father isn’t working, there’s no reason for the public to fund daycare so that the wives can work - daddy can do daycare.

However, the charedim managed to leverage this into yet another way to extract money from the taxpaying (i.e. non-charedi) population. They used their political clout to have families in which the husband learns in kollel classified as being eligible, even though they are neither working nor studying towards gainful employment. It thereby entirely undermined the purpose of the subsidies, as well as enabling charedim to be disproportionately large recipients of them compared to their percentage of the population.

But last year, the High Court ruled last June that learning in yeshiva/ kollel would no longer provide a legal exemption from military service. And the Attorney-General’s office pointed out that by subsidizing men to be in kollel, this was effectively incentivizing them to choose a lifestyle without enlistment. In light of the terrible IDF manpower shortage, this subsidy was cancelled.

Since then, the government has been trying to figure out a way to overcome this and continue to financially enable charedim not to serve in exchange for political support. Efforts to undermine the High Court and the Attorney-General’s power are ongoing, but in the meanwhile, the government came up with a work-around. It proposed a law by which daycare subsidies would be granted simply on the basis of the mother’s status, without regard to what the father is doing. And in addition, to ensure that these funds would primarily go to charedim rather than be spread among the general population, the calculation would then take the father back into account and only grant subsidies to parents in which the combined income is less than a certain amount.

At this point it’s not even remotely surprising that when the country is under such strain from nearly three years of war, the charedim are still working to extract resources from everyone else rather than contribute. It’s not even particularly surprising that the parties of Likud, so-called “Religious Zionism” and so-called “Jewish Strength” are enabling it; these parties have long made it clear that the cost to the reservists and the long-term cost to Israel is much less important than their holding on to power and planting a few extra settlements.

And yet, this move is clearly very unpopular with the general public, for obvious reasons. Polls are showing that the government is bleeding voters. So how is the government moving ahead with it - aren’t they worried that it threatens their hold on power? The answer is that they were indeed worried about this, but the charedim used a potent threat to get their way.

Yet what people don’t realize is that this particular threat not only reveals the usual charedi disregard for the welfare of reservists and for the economics of the country; it also reveals a charedi disregard for fundamental national well-being, echoing an even darker example of this from years past.