Israelis can’t take good news.
Give the inhabitants of Zion some good news and in most cases they won’t believe you, they’ll think you’re trying to blindfold them, and they’ll try to figure out where the catch is – because there has to be be a catch
For example, consider the recent annual World Happiness Report by a United Nations agency, which moved Israel up five places from ninth. Fourth happiest country in 137 surveys, One can imagine that such an announcement would be a source of pride, bringing half smiles to people’s faces. It did not happen. Instead, the reflexive response covered in the media was: “Well, this survey was taken late last year before our current troubles. Let’s see how high we rank now!”
or take the rain
Appropriately, this county has long been plagued by rain, and has been seeing for years The water level of Kinneret lake increases in winter And falling into summer was a national pastime. Now, thanks to desalination, the kinnarate level is less important, but old habits die hard And we still pay a lot of attention to the annual rainfall rate.
But no matter how much it rains or how blessed someone is rain of a particular year Maybe, we are constantly told that it is not enough and the water situation in the country is dire.
If it rains so much in Tel Aviv that naval commandos are sent with rubber boats to rescue people from flooded homes, we will be told that all that water is wasted and washed away into the sea. If it rains and rains in Jerusalem, as it sometimes does, we will be told that this did not improve the country’s water situation because all that rain went into the wrong aquifer.
no matter how it rains hardIt’s never enough, or it’s the wrong kind of rain, or it’s raining in the wrong places.
And that says something about the psyche of this country. If there is a ray of hope, the Israelis will look for a cloud.
We got a good example of this on Monday morning when reactions poured in following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement the night before of plans to start giving parents with children aged zero to three. Monthly subsidy, tax benefits – or both – to help pay for daycare,
The plan also earmarked hundreds of millions of shekels to build new child daycare centers and train people to work in them. The Prime Minister said that this was the first phase of a plan to eventually provide free education for children in the age group of zero to three years.
As soon as his press conference was over, the criticism started pouring in.
The plan isn’t good enough, some critics said.
Others complained that it discriminated between those whose children are in government-supervised daycare centers, of which there are not enough, and those who are not—supervised daycare centers receiving nearly the entire subsidy.
Still, others said not enough money was being spent to improve the conditions of daycare workers so that more people could go into the profession and more government-supervised centers could be opened, and others complained that Netanyahu had recently promised free child care during the U.S. election campaign, but it was far from it.
And while all of this may be true, it misses the point.
So what is the point?
The point is that this program at least begins something that should have been created long ago: an effort to ease the burden for middle- and low-income families to pay for daycare for their children so that they can stay outside. Can go and work. As it stands now, often the money spent to pay for daycare – it can reach up to NIS 7,000 for two children – takes up a large chunk of a parent’s salary.
Is planning everything? no, is it enough? Not even. But it is something, and that something – a tax break of NIS 945 for parents of each child in private daycare and an additional NIS 1,700 subsidy for the lucky 20% in government-supervised facilities – is not insignificant.
The plan is not correct. But, as the saying goes, the best is the enemy of the good. It’s good for what it does, and it’s starting a process that will eventually culminate in free daycare for all working parents. This is good news, and it would be refreshing if it could be accepted as such.
The journey to free child care starts with a single tax credit. At least the journey has begun.
The other good news in the announcement of the government is the announcement itself. Finally, with this announcement, the government – as the Knesset begins its summer session – is looking beyond its judicial overhaul plan and tackling issues that “affect life itself.”
When historians look back on this tumultuous domestic period, some will undeniably note that this government ditched the traditional 100-day grace period, which usually hinges on a very controversial judicial overhaul, with public scrutiny from the start. enjoys together.
Those first three months are when the public expects the new government to address the issues highlighted during the campaign. Netanyahu’s campaign focused primarily on economic and security problems, and more subtly on judicial reform.
Yet within a week of coming to power, the government launched a sweeping judicial reform plan that divided the country – seemingly focusing all its energy on that – but skimmed those two other issues. .
That was a mistake. The reform plan should have been introduced gradually after trying to build a national consensus on the matter. And the time and energy spent on that should have been spent on issues of economic and personal security.
This has been revealed in a survey conducted by Panels Politics last week. Forty-eight percent of the 526 respondents said that the high cost of living was the most important issue for the government and the Knesset to deal with, followed by only 22% who said judicial reform was the top priority, and another 14% said the main issue was personal safety. Was.
“The people want judicial reform,” was one of the slogans at Thursday night’s massive judicial reform rally in Jerusalem. Some people do, an equal amount clearly don’t. But everyone wants to see action to lower the cost of living. By rolling out the first phase of a plan to introduce free daycare for infants, the government has finally begun to address that issue. that is good news. Not bad news, but good news. full stop.