Israelis can’t take good news.
Give the denizens of Zion some good news and in most cases they won’t believe you, they’ll think you are trying to pull the wool over their eyes, and they’ll try to figure out where the catch is – because there must be a catch.
For instance, consider the recent annual World Happiness Report by a UN agency that moved Israel up five slots from the ninth- to the fourth-happiest country out of 137 surveyed. One would imagine that this type of announcement would be a source of pride, something to bring a half-smile to people’s faces. It didn’t. Instead, the reflexive reaction covered in the media was this: “Well, this poll was taken at the end of last year, before our current troubles. Let’s see how high we would rank now!”
Or take the rain
Justifiably, this county has long been obsessed with rain, and for years, watching Lake Kinneret rise in the winter and fall in the summer was a national pastime. Now, thanks to desalination, the Kinneret level is less critical, but old habits die hard and we still pay a lot of attention to annual rainfall rates.
But no matter how much it may rain or how blessed one particular year’s rainfall may be, we are constantly told that it is not enough and that the country’s water situation is dire.
If it rains so much in Tel Aviv that the naval commandos will be sent in with rubber dinghies to rescue people from their flooded homes, we will be told that all that water was wasted and flowed into the sea. If it rains and pours cats and dogs in Jerusalem, as it sometimes does, we will be told that this did not improve the country’s water situation because all that rain seeped into the wrong aquifer.
No matter how hard it rains, it is never enough, or it is the wrong kind of rain, or it is raining in the wrong places.
And that says something about this country’s psyche. If there is a silver lining, Israelis will hunt for the cloud.
We got a good example of that on Monday morning as reactions poured in following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announcement the night before of a plan to begin giving parents with children aged zero to three monthly subsidies, tax benefits – or both – to help pay for daycare.
The plan also earmarked hundreds of millions of shekels to build new infant daycare centers and train people to work in them. The prime minister said this was the first stage of a plan to eventually provide free education for children aged zero to three.
No sooner did his press conference end, than the criticism began.
The plan is not enough, some critics said.
Others complained that it discriminates between those whose children are in government-supervised daycare centers, of which there are not enough, and those who are not – with those in the supervised daycare centers receiving almost a full subsidy.
Still, others wailed that not enough money was being spent to improve the conditions of daycare workers so that more people go into the profession and more government-supervised centers could be opened, and others grumbled that Netanyahu promised free infant childcare during the recent election campaign, but that this was far from that.
And while all that might be true, it misses the point.
So what is the point?
The point is that this program at least starts something that should have been created a long time ago: an effort to alleviate the back-breaking burden for middle- and low-income families of paying for daycare for their children so that they can go out and work. As things stand now, often the money put out to pay for daycare – it could reach as high as NIS 7,000 for two children – takes up the lion’s share of one parent’s salary.
Is this plan everything? No. Is it enough? Also no. But it is something, and that something – a tax break of NIS 945 for the parents of each child in private daycare and an additional NIS 1,700 subsidy for those lucky 20% in government-supervised facilities – is not insignificant.
The plan is not perfect. But, as the saying goes, perfect is the enemy of the good. It is good for what it does, and it is starting a process that in the end will hopefully culminate in free daycare for all working parents. That’s good news, and it would be refreshing if it could be accepted as such.
The journey toward free infant child care starts with a single tax credit. At least the journey has begun.
The other good news in the government’s announcement is the announcement itself. Finally, with this announcement, the government – just as the Knesset began its summer session – is looking beyond its judicial overhaul plan and dealing with issues that “affect life itself.”
When historians look back upon this turbulent domestic period, some will unquestionably take note that this government squandered the traditional 100-day period of grace it generally enjoys with the public by obsessing from the outset on the very contentious judicial overhaul.
Those first three months are when the public expects the new government to jump into addressing the issues highlighted during the campaign. Netanyahu’s campaign focused primarily on economic and security problems, and more tangentially on judicial reform.
Yet within a week of coming into power, the government launched a sweeping judicial overhaul plan that split the country – seemingly concentrating all its energy on that – but gave short shrift to those two other issues.
That was a mistake. The reform plan should instead have been introduced gradually, after an attempt to build national consensus on the matter. And the time and energy expended on it should instead have been spent on economic and personal security issues.
A poll taken last week by Panels Politics bears this out. Forty-eight percent of 526 respondents said that the high cost of living was the most important issue for the government and Knesset to tackle, followed by only 22% who said judicial reform was the top priority, and another 14% who said the main issue was personal security.
“The people want judicial reform,” was one of the slogans chanted at Thursday night’s massive pro-judicial reform rally in Jerusalem. Some of the people do, an equal amount apparently do not. But everyone wants to see action to lower the cost of living. By launching stage one of a plan to introduce free daycare for infants, the government finally began addressing that issue. That is good news. Not perfect news, but good news. Full stop.