The passion of Vikki Knafo

The heavily taxed, stagnant economy created by our welfare system militates against job creation. Chronic unemployment deprives Knafo and people like her of job opportunities that would constructively engage their energies and talents. Worse, even when some of them do find work, their salaries are so heavily taxed – and prices of consumer goods are so highly inflated by Israeli monopolies – that it is difficult for them to make ends meet.

Being on welfare is therefore a far more lucrative alternative. The various welfare payments and benefits far exceed the low salaries unskilled workers receive. Which is why in the last decade the number of those who receive supplemental income and benefits from the government has skyrocketed. It is also why these beneficiaries, such as single mothers, are fighting Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s attempt to get them off the welfare rolls and go to work. It simply does not pay.

Moreover, a welfare mentality promoted by powerful social lobbies and NGOs has accustomed most Israelis to consider welfare and other government handouts a birthright. They see government giving the rich and the powerful benefits worth billions, and say “Why not us?” It does not even occur to them that remaining idle while benefiting from income earned by hardworking taxpayers may be a moral problem.

The most well funded ($20 million a year) social advocacy group is the New Israel Fund. When it is not doing battle against globalization and economic development it devotes large chunks of its resources to organizing beneficiary groups that are taught “to realize their rights” for welfare rather than work.

So small wonder that even fine people from the “weakened groups” in the so-called development towns, people with great potential like Vikki Knafo, are being reduced to the status of schnorrer by all these social welfare organizations promoting leftist causes.

These organizations do nothing to redress the real problems facing low-income people: lack of work, highly taxed income and inflated costs. Instead, they promote a curious inversion of the Zionist dream that hoped to make a new and productive people out of a putative nation of schnorrers.

TO REALIZE what perverse conditions Israel’s radical welfare state created, try to imagine the energetic Knafo in suburban America. Even in small towns that recall Mitzpe Ramon she would probably be very successful, possessing a nice home and two cars. Only in the economically barren Israeli “periphery” (a joke really, since it is about 100 miles from Tel Aviv) despoiled by years of government “development” and welfarism are people of her quality doomed to remain clients of the welfare state with all that implies in terms of dependency on a politicized bureaucracy and the demoralization of a life without work.

What is astounding is that even if Knafo and her friends have been victims of a retrograde economic system that destroys work opportunities, that punishes those who work and rewards those who do not, powerful political forces and organizations ostensibly devoted to social betterment are doing all they can to keep her dependent on the system by energetically promoting the notion that only through dependency on welfare can she survive, even fulfill herself.

As the web site of a New Israel Fund subsidiary organization, Shatil, explains, it promotes “social justice” (you know what that means), human and citizens’ rights etc. etc., and helps create lobbies for welfare recipients by, inter alia, providing help in getting grants for such activities as “The Rich Get Rich and The Poor Fill In Grant Requests,” the statement explains.

According to its activists, Shatil has also been active in Mitzpe Ramon in galvanizing the anger of “the weakened strata” against government economic policy by “building power from the bottom up.” This includes teaching the local population about political and ideological principles, so they can “recognize the connection between capital and government and the fact that the employment of foreign workers is encouraged by the government because it reduces wages and the power of organized labor.”

KNAFO’S PROTEST resulted from this kind of agitation by Shatil. Even before she set out on her mission Shatil encouraged her to go. Shatil activists even gave the mission its catchy label “A March to the End of the Road” (meaning the end of the government’s road). Shatil later facilitated Knafo’s media exposure, mapped her strategy (warned her not to become politically identified and to claim that she represents a wider group than she does) and guided her through her negotiations with the Ministry of Finance.

It was all done not just to help Knafo, but, in the words of Shlomit Asheri, the Shatil representative attached to Knafo (who defines her task as “strictly political”), “to hopefully see a social revolution.”

Knafo’s is the most publicized effort by groups organized and supported by Shatil to push a radical leftist agenda among new immigrants, residents of development towns and Arabs. It is curious that this effort is financed by such capitalist entities as Faizer Pharmaceuticals Ltd., the Bronfman philanthropies, Lester Crown of General Dynamics and many more (reportedly also including the European Union and The British Lottery).

A visit to the tents the Kibbutz movement has provided for the single mothers, and long conversations with some of them, revealed the following picture:

Most of the time there are no more than three to six authentic welfare recipients among the crowd of 30 to 40 persons milling in front of the Ministry of Finance. All the rest are enablers representing Shatil, the Kibbutz movement, Na’amat, the Labor women’s organization, a few Shas activists and the odd assortment of characters with personal missions or peeves that is always attracted by TV cameras.

Then there are the politicians, of course – on this particular occasion Ran Cohen and Haim Oron of Meretz, who lectured the women at length on how shifty Netanyahu is “screwing” them and how his whole lousy economic program must be undermined.

The women seemed rather baffled by all this attention. They could not even make sense of what sort of “social revolution” they were supposed to spearhead. But given enough time, they will learn.

The social enablers, politicians and a media determined to see a new anti-reform, anti-Netanyahu social movement (which Chanel 1 economic analyst Oded Shahar is already anticipating) will get their mass “spontaneous” protest movement even if in reality it comprises only a few dozen women – by a very generous count – organized and prodded by bodies with a political ax to grind.

There are many poor people in Israel, and even those who are not poor can hardly make ends meet on measly salaries, high taxes and inflated costs. But the answer to their plight does not lie in reinstating the socialist welfare state responsible for their predicament in the first place.

But this is precisely what most social advocacy groups want to happen. And they cynically exploit Knafo’s plight and passion to advance their ideological and political ambitions.