Too bad these reports aren’t taken seriously by the media, ‘the watchdog of democracy’. Instead, these periodical are good for two things only:
frontpage headlines and high-paid tv news-readers weeping for the cameras for one day (at most a whole week if they put together a whole ‘series’).
The main parameter used by the study to judge poverty in Israel is an income of 1 743 NIS a month. In comparison, next door in Jordan 1 743 NIS is a heck of a lot of money. Why the comparision? Not that I’m dismissing the problem of ‘poverty’, but can you compare apples with oranges? Can you compare a ‘regular’ two car, two children family, with two working parents who’s motivation to work is to live comfortably and amass wealth with a large beduoin family living in a tent in the negev living off agriculture and enjoying this traditional life?
I heard one sociologist interviewed a few years back who said that the ‘problem’ will keep getting worse for a few reasons:
-most of these people and children are in the Haredi, Arab, and Beduoin sectors.
-these sectors have higher birthrates than the ‘regular’ people,
-these sectors are not always characterized with the search for wealth and material possesions,
-these sectors live fine(? for lack of a better word right now) with much less than other ‘regular’ people who have jobs and pursue income to ‘live comfortably’,
-1 743 goes much farther in these communities than in the ‘regular’ urban sectors,
-what was the benchmark the year before? Was it raised this time since the average salary has risen?
The fallacy of this study is that it tries to generalize an entire population that is growing culturaly more heterogenous every day as opposed to a ‘regular’ western country where everyone can be judged on the same level more or less. Not here.