"Economic growth? Economic growth is for the people who live on the other side, not the people who live around here," say the drivers waiting for customers at the Yehud Taxi stand. By "the other side," they may mean Yehud's Monosson neighborhood, with its old wealth, or Yehud's Kiryat Savyonim neighborhood, with its newer wealth. Or they could be talking about the neighboring city of Savyon, with its outrageous wealth, old and new.
The Yehud Taxi stand is in the middle of old, rundown Rehov Sa'adia Hatuka, which used to be the commercial center of this city of 28,000, just north of Ben-Gurion Airport. Last week, about the only customers out in the afternoon were a few old men drinking coffee outside a felafel shop. The blocks of stores here have been made nearly obsolete by the aging and the worsening economic condition of city center residents, along with the growing wealth of the city's outer neighborhoods. The current commercial hub of Yehud is shiny Savyonim Mall, built a dozen years ago.
The taxi drivers crowd around us to complain that all the talk of economic growth is just a "bluff," since their own personal economies just keep contracting. "I work from five in the morning until seven at night, six days a week, and in a good month I take home NIS 4,500," says Dekel Ohana, 27, a driver who, for lack of rent money, lives at his in-laws' home with his pregnant wife. "On TV all you hear about is growth, growth, growth. So maybe I took in a tiny bit more last year, but my expenses have gone up a lot more - gas, of course, but everything else, too. Even the price of bread.
"My wife also works. She makes NIS 2,000 a month as a receptionist in Petah Tikva, and the commute costs her NIS 1,700."
Locals often speak of Yehud as two cities - one poor, one prosperous. Rehov Sa'adia Hatuka is the heart of lower-middle-class Yehud, the original, now central, section of the city, with its blocks and blocks of old, shabby tenements and little shops. Kiryat Savyonim, or western Yehud, is the new, richer part of the city with the mall, the gleaming high-rise apartment buildings amid tall, perfectly trimmed trees, the winding "Hollandic" streets of sleek, stand-offish two-story houses with carved-wood front doors and elaborate ironwork gates, the jeeps parked outside; and, unlike the poorer side of Yehud, the sidewalks that are all but empty of people.
"You want to ask me about my income?" says a dyed-blonde woman of about 50 in tight, shiny black slacks, getting out of her black jeep. Smiling crisply, she tells us, "I'm not prepared to answer," and heads into her duplex.
The houses in Kiryat Savyonim go for about $500,000, says Erez, who lives in one of them. Some of the older, larger houses covered with foliage and sitting in the middle of lush gardens in the Monosson section are worth around $1.5 million, he notes.
Until the mid-1990s, Erez lived with his wife and children in Monosson's row of low-cost tenements, an anomalous block hidden from view by a stand of tall trees. Since then, he's moved way up in class. A father of three whose wife can afford to stay at home with the kids, Erez has prospered with the rise of the hi-tech industry. After 12 years with the local branch of an international firm, he's made manager and now earns about NIS 40,000 a month plus a bonus of about NIS 75,000 at the end of the year. (All salary figures are before taxes.)
"I was good enough at my job to get promotions," he says, "but even if I hadn't, even if I'd stayed in the same position in the company, my salary still would have gone up respectably."
The news in Israel is about growth, growth, growth. The January 1 front-page headline of Yediot Aharonot described 2007 as "The good year" - one that saw not only a steep drop in terror and traffic deaths, but also an economic growth rate of 5.3 percent, which means the population, as a whole, earned 5.3% more money than it did the year before. The economy has been growing at roughly this rate for the last 4 1/2 years, making it one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.
The three main reasons for this prosperity were cited recently by the Bank of Israel: the effective taming of the intifada (everywhere but in the communities bordering the Gaza Strip); the upturn in the global economy, especially the hi-tech industry, which has a disproportionately large presence here; and the government's budget-cutting, tax-cutting economic policy.
So is the new prosperity limited to the rich and upper-middle-class or does it benefit the average Joe and his poor cousin as well? The story in Yehud, where the average salary runs somewhat higher than the national average, is instructive.
"YOU SEE the growth here mainly among the well-off - the high-level managers, the higher-ups in finance," says Adina Hacham, general manager of the Yehud Municipality. "The middle-class, the average people, are doing a little better - the salesmen, the contractors. The poor - the clerks, the menial laborers - don't feel any improvement."
The good news from Yehud, as in the country overall, is that unemployment has gone down sharply during the years of growth. Nationwide, it went from a high of more than 11% in 2002 to a low of 6.6%, which was announced this week. Simply put, companies are hiring new employees because they're making more money.
"Yehud is in the center of the country, so anybody here who wants to work can get a job," says Yitzhak Rosenberg, a 30-year veteran of the city's Social Services Department and now its head. Because of the increase in jobs, together with the government's tightened welfare restrictions, many Yehud residents have gotten off the dole and found work.
However, the bulk of these jobs have been for minimum wage or thereabouts, often only part-time, with few or no benefits. A clear sign that most of these new jobs offer bottom-scale wages is the recent, sharp decrease in the average national salary - from NIS 7,800 a month in summer 2007 to NIS 7,400 in the fall. (The most telling statistic of income inequality is this: 70% of employees earn less than the average salary, only 30% earn above it.)
