The forgotten poor

This is a “middle-class” economic protest, say the protesters, who quickly add that it represents poor people and their interests, too. But activists on behalf of the poor – the nearly one in four Israelis whose income is less than half the median income – say the protest movement is for the middle-class only, which is a real problem.

“It’s perfectly legitimate for the middle class and young couples to want to be able to afford to buy an apartment in a good neighborhood, to have a good quality of life, but poor people just want a roof over their heads anywhere,” says Eran Weintraub, chairman of Latet, the national umbrella organization for some 150 soup kitchens, clothing charities and other aid centers that count 60,000 families as clients.

“The people we serve are not going to the protests – they’re too preoccupied with the business of daily survival,” he adds.

Says Abraham Israel, chairman of Hazon Yeshaya, which provides assistance to 14,000 poor people a day: “My heart goes out to the middle class because they’re getting wiped out, they have a very, very hard timing paying their bills – but the protests are not conveying the problems of the poor, which are far from those of the middle class.

“The middle class want to keep what they’ve got, they want relief from mortgage payments or rent of NIS 3,000, NIS 4,000 a month, they want lower VAT, free daycare – but the severely poor don’t have apartments, they have one room in a shack with nothing in it. They don’t pay electricity bills because they don’t have electricity. We give free dental care, and people come in here without teeth. Do you see middle-class Israelis without teeth?”

In the Yad Beyad nonprofit grocery story that serves thousands of welfare recipients in Lod, I ask manager Bezalel Globerman if he thinks the protests represent his customers.

“We were just talking about that,” he says. “Those protesters, they’re all from the Tel Aviv bubble.”

It’s Sunday morning, and the demonstrations the previous night also took place in Haifa, Jerusalem, Ashkelon and other cities, I tell him.

“And do you think the poor are going to get anything out of this?” he asks. “The government will do something to keep the middle class quiet. The only thing they ever told the poor was to go out and work, and they did, but how can you live on NIS 4,000 a month? You have to help people starting at the bottom, then work your way up to the middle class, and that’s not the message of these demonstrations.”

A social worker in a poor Tel Aviv-area neighborhood asserts that “the old people aren’t going to get anything out of this, the handicapped aren’t going to get anything out of this, the people living on NIS 2,000 a month in state aid aren’t going to get anything out of this.

Middle-class Israelis live so far beyond their means – the flashy weddings and bar mitzvas, the vacations, the restaurants, the plasma TVs, the cellphones, the way they spoil their kids. The government should help the poor; it should lower the prices on basic goods, it should give more money to the aged, the handicapped and people who earn the minimum wage or less, instead of giving it to the middle class.”

True or not, this is what many advocates of the poor believe: that the middle- class protests are ignoring, or largely ignoring, the people who need economic help the most.

If you look at the explicit demands of the protesters, the claim by anti-poverty activists seems unfair: The demonstrators are calling for the government to build more housing for the needy, which is probably the key demand by poor people who can’t afford rent; a turn away from low-wage, highexploitation manpower companies that staff large companies and have undercut unionization; a shift away from flatrate taxes like VAT, and toward income tax, where rates rise or fall depending on income; more funding for healthcare so quality care does not require paying privately; and free daycare and nursery school.

All these measures would ease the economic burden on everyone, but especially the lower middle class and “working poor.” So on paper, the protests are not only for the “Tel Aviv bubble” – known mainly as the home of college students who will be high earners later on in life, and high-maintenance “free professionals.”

Yet it’s possible to get the impression that the protests do not speak for the poor because, for one, they do not speak of the poor, only of the middleclass. This is unprecedented in Israeli socioeconomic protests; in the past, from the protests by poor Sephardim in Haifa’s Wadi Salib neighborhood in the late ’50s, to the Black Panther protests of the ’70s, to the tent camps of the early ’90s, to Vikki Knafo’s single-mothers protest of 2003, social protests in the country have always been carried out in the name of people who can’t feed their families of have a roof over their heads – not the people who have a satisfactory standard of living but can’t afford it anymore, i.e., the middle class.

Still, this seems to be a key reason the protests are gaining 90-percent approval ratings in the polls and drawing such huge crowds – because they’re not to trying to fix how “the other half lives,” but how both halves live, or both halves minus the rich who don’t need any fixing. The protests don’t ask Israelis to show compassion for those less fortunate than themselves, they ask Israelis to start looking out for No. 1. Big difference, and it seems to be paying off.

Another reason anti-poverty advocates get the impression that their clients’ interests aren’t being represented in the protests is that their clients, with relatively few exceptions, aren’t joining the ranks. Some are too busy with survival, as Weintraub says. But there are other reasons as well.

“A lot of the old people in this neighborhood are ashamed to go out of the house, they’re so poor,” says Rachel Gispan, 67, a pensioner sitting with her husband Nissim, 74, at a senior citizen’s center in Tel Aviv’s Hatikva Quarter.

“We’re protesting here in Lod, nowhere else. This is where our fight is, for the people of this city,” states Suleiman Dohal, 45, a municipal employee, in the tent camp on Lod’s Jerusalem Boulevard. Of 34 tents, six belong to Arab families.

“He’s Arab, I’m haredi, and we’re all together,” says Zvika Tsarfati, 32, sporting a white kippa and long sidecurls. The most talkative of the tent-dwellers, he says he works at a local synagogue, mikve and charity organization, but that his business collapsed. “I used to give charity, now I need charity,” he says.

Israeli Arabs have a few protest tents, most prominently in Jaffa, and Israeli Arab writer Oudeh Basharat was one of a small handful of speakers at last Saturday night’s mammoth rally in Tel Aviv. But though they make up one of the two chief “demographics” of poverty in this country, Israeli Arabs have been relatively faceless in these protests.

The other chief demographic of poverty, the haredim, have stayed away altogether, although this has been explained by the close mixture of men and women at the rallies. Also absent have been Ethiopians, the poorest of the nation’s Jews.

The aged likewise were all but invisible at the protests – until Monday of this week, when hundreds of them protested outside the Tel Aviv government compound to demand higher benefits and lower prices on medicine and other basic necessities.

The protesters are disproportionately young, secular, from Tel Aviv and its environs, and middle-class, albeit at the struggling lower end of the middle class. So it’s no surprise that prominent advocates of the poor think the protest is distorted, that the people who need help most are not being heard and so will not be served by any new government policy that emerges.

Yet polls show the protests drawing roughly 90% support from the public, which means most poor people support them, too. Interviews in poor neighborhoods in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Lod largely bore this out.

In Jerusalem’s Ramot Polin haredi neighborhood, Shlomo Vital, 21 – an unmarried yeshiva student visiting from Ramat Beit Shemesh, where he lives with his parents – says he supports the demonstrations because of the need to bring down housing costs.

“People in this neighborhood build little flats on the roofs of buildings and rent them for NIS 2,500,” he says. “The demand for housing is overwhelming, and it’s driving up prices.”

Yael, 35, a mother of seven whose husband teaches at a yeshiva, says, “The government has to bring in economic reforms, so I’m definitely for the protests.”

Both she and Vital, however, say they have little knowledge of the demonstrations, because like most haredim, they don’t have televisions, and the haredi newspapers offer scant coverage of the events.

At the senior citizens’ center in Tel Aviv – across the street from Hatikva Park, where a couple of dozen housing protesters are camped out in tents – Rachel and Nissim Gispan sit at a table next to Avraham Boyko, 87. Nissim, a retired factory worker, and Rachel, a mother of three grown children, get by on a combined NIS 3,800 a month in pension. Boyko, with two grandchildren, his daughter having passed away, is a retired senior surveyor who lives on NIS 11,500 a month in pension.

All three support the protests.

“The situation is terrible, it’s impossible for young couples to raise children,” says Rachel. “Water bills are hell, gas bills are hell, electricity bills are hell, feeding a family is hell. That’s the way it was for us when we were raising children in this neighborhood. All my children have lung problems because of the moisture in our apartment, from the water leaking in from the roof.”

Proudly she says she mounted a successful one-woman protest against the Tel Aviv Municipality in 1971 to demand a low-rent public housing flat: “I was pregnant, I was having labor pains, and I was screaming outside City Hall, people were watching, they called the police on me, what a time! But I got my apartment.”

I ask if she identifies with the protesters.

“Of course, completely,” she says. “I hope they succeed. They should be able raise their children in happiness, not sorrow like we did.”

Will their success also mean the success of strapped elderly people like herself? “I can only hope,” she replies.

Nissim has his reservations about the protest because of the tent camp in the park outside.

“Come here at night you’ll see some of them driving up in their Mercedes and BMWs. They want to get a cheap apartment out of the protest, but they don’t deserve it.” After a little coaxing from his wife, though, he adds, “I’m for the students and the young couples, but not for the parasites.”

“The government has to sort out the people who deserve help and those who don’t,” says Rachel, to Nissim’s approval.

Boyko readily acknowledges that he is well-fixed financially, and that he supports the protesters “with all my heart” because he knows very well that few old people are in his situation. “Most of them live on NIS 6,000 or NIS 7,000 a month and still have to pay rent; how can they?”

This plagues all of society, he goes on.

“There’s no middle class anymore, just rich and poor. And the poor are very bitter. I go places by taxi and I talk to the drivers and they tell me they’re driving 12 hours a day for NIS 7,000 or NIS 8,000 a month.”

Until a couple of years ago, Boyko gave regular financial help to his two grandchildren and their families, until they were able to support themselves on their own. “If I hadn’t helped them, they couldn’t have made ends meet.”

Outside the Yad Beyad nonprofit grocery store in Lod, Mazal, 40, an Ethiopian immigrant widow and mother of five carrying a couple of bags of groceries, says she makes NIS 4,000 a month as a bank clerk, and she identifies with the protesters and believes they speak for her, too.

“My electricity bill got raised from NIS 300 a month to NIS 600 [before the new 10% rate hike now going into effect], and I can’t get through the month, either,” she says.

I don’t want to insult anyone by asking them if they consider themselves poor, so I ask if they consider themselves middle-class.

Yael, in Ramot Polin, says, “Yes, we work, we don’t twiddle our thumbs.”

Mazal replies by saying, “I’m not rich, I don’t have it easy.”

None of these people attend the demonstrations, none say the protests are a major topic of conversation among their family and friends, and none follow them too closely. To them, it seems the protests stand more for economic relief for the needy in general, for all those who have trouble getting through the month, and not just for the middle class.

At the tent camp on Lod’s Jerusalem Boulevard, though, the reaction is somewhat different. I am told that nearly all of the heads of the 36 families present work, but that they are far from being middle-class. One woman is being evicted with her three children for non-payment of rent. Tsarfati says he’s a single father raising eight kids on NIS 5,000 a month in benefits and work here and there.

Avi, 46, a single father of five, says he’s raising his kids on NIS 4,000 a month, also in benefits and random jobs.

“We’re not middle-class, we’re poverty line,” he says, and others gathered around agree.

Ironically, or maybe not, the best-situated of all those I interview is the most critical of the demographics of the protest movement.

“What they’re doing is totally justified, I support them completely, but our situation here is light years from theirs,” says Mickey Basson, 27, who makes NIS 7,000 a month with Israel Railways, and whose wife is pregnant with their second child.

“Every month I add another NIS 2,000 to my overdraft; it’s at NIS 30,000, and at the rate I’m going, I won’t have a place to live like a lot of the other people here,” he says.

“Lod is not Tel Aviv, and the families at the protests who can’t get through the month when they’re making NIS 20,000 between them ought to look in the mirror.”

The middle-class protests don't speak for those just looking to ensure they eat three meals a day and have a roof over their heads. Or do they?