Wartime Looting

A crime against the nation - by the government

There used to be two types of looting. There was that done by armies during a war, from the people that they conquered. And there was that done by civilians from their co-citizens during a war or other chaotic situation, taking advantage of the distractions and lack of enforcement during such periods. In this war, we have a new type of looting in Israel: the government is taking advantage of the distractions and lack of public attention during this period to transfer gigantic sums to the charedi community.

The budget was just approved without the Draft Exemption Law going through yet. Without this law that Bibi still wants to pass as soon as the war is over, the charedim have no legal exemption from army service and consequently all kinds of funds are held up. So why did the charedi parties consent to approving the budget?

Because they get the next best thing. The government does virtually no enforcement of the draft anyway for charedim, and the government also agreed to transfer literally billions of shekels to them under the designation “Coalition Funds.”

This is particularly egregious for two reasons. First is that, as you may have noticed, Israel has been at war for nearly three years. Wars are really, really, really expensive for the economy. There’s all the munitions and equipment. There’s all the payments to the hundreds of thousands of reservists. There’s all the costs for compensating and taking care of victims and evacuees and others. There’s all the costs of rebuilding buildings damaged by rockets and missiles. There’s all the compensation that needs to be paid for business and other enterprises that suffer.

The wars of the last few years have been so expensive that instead of a normal budget increase, there’s been a 3% budget cut for everything aside the military. Education, medical care, welfare services, everything. People suffering economically from the war are not being compensated properly. Towns such as Kiryat Shmona and those bordering Gaza, totally ravaged by the war, are in a terrible state.

And yet while 150 million shekels were removed from the rehabilitation budget for battered towns, the government sends billions of shekels to yeshivos and supporting deliberately underemployed charedim! This includes millions to yeshivos for “kids at risk,” which are designed to ensure that they stay in the charedi framework even if they are not learning, so that they don’t enlist. It’s perverse. Community leaders in the battered north have commented that while Hezbollah and Iran have caused them financial catastrophe, it’s the actions of the current Israeli government which have crushed their spirit.

But it’s even worse than that. This is not just a matter of transferring desperately-needed funds to unimportant causes and the undeserving. It’s actively creating an even bigger economic problem down the line. Propping up the charedi lifestyle of dependency only makes things worse as that society rapidly grows.

The High Court, pointing out that the government has made no real attempt to actually deal with the IDF manpower crisis by enforcing the draft in the charedi community, has put a block on some of the funding. The Likud and the charedim will probably find some way to transfer it anyway, as they illegally did with the funding for charedi schools which are supposed to teach a core curriculum that helps the students but do not actually do so.

We can only hope that in the next elections, a government will be formed that does not rely on support from anti-Zionists who go against traditional Torah values by proudly draining the nation’s material resources and harming its morale.