Since the beginning of the current war, Israel has faced a dual existential threat: a military threat that momentarily shook the very existence of our country; and a threat of social disintegration due to the scale of evacuees and those who lost everything, as well as the war’s impact on the country’s most vulnerable populations.
While the military threat appears, at the time of writing, to be more or less under control, the social impact of the war on Israeli society will undoubtedly be felt for many years to come.
As a reminder, on the eve of the war Israeli society was, according to official figures, one of the poorest in the OECD, with just under 21% of the population living below the poverty line. It is a deeply unequal, two-tiered society where social Darwinism prevails. On one side is the Start-Up Nation, where many believe in the possibility of accumulating enough wealth in a few years to secure several generations. On the other side is the soup kitchen nation: more than 2.7 million people, according to the latest alternative report from Latet, are struggling daily to stay afloat economically – a daily life where every shekel counts.
From the first days of the war, while Israel faced military enemies on more than seven fronts, the social battle unfolded on two fronts. The first front is the 250,000 evacuees (at its peak) within the country, who, in a matter of hours, abandoned their homes and jobs. The second front is the impact on Israel’s impoverished populations, who bore the brunt of the shutdown of entire sectors of the economy.
Walking through the streets of Ofakim or Kiryat Shmona, one understands how these two fronts merged after October 7, highlighting the South and the North as blind spots in Israeli society. These regions represent entire parts of our country where the state failed to ensure the physical and social security of its citizens. A terrible double burden has befallen our fellow citizens in Israel’s infamous social and geographic periphery.
As for the first front, the state system once again demonstrated its inability to handle a large-scale crisis in its initial weeks. It was the unprecedented mobilization of civil society and thousands of individual initiatives that allowed us to endure this ordeal without irreversible social damage. It seems that today, the state has finally grasped the scale of the event and is trying to respond as best it can, though with the usual gaps when it comes to setting bureaucratic rules to identify citizens in need.
However, nothing has been done for the second social front – the populations in need before the war, who now find themselves in even greater difficulty. In an instant, it is as though they disappeared from public debate and the radar scope of our leaders. This group, one of the largest social segments in Israeli society, will have to face several simultaneous phenomena following the war:
- The catastrophic impact of the conflict on sectors such as food service, agriculture, and tourism – major providers of precarious jobs and low-income workers – has led to over 180,000 people losing their jobs in the war’s first months.
- A sharp rise in the cost of living, especially due to inflation and particularly in food prices. The cost of living recently accelerated further with the simultaneous increase in VAT, transportation costs, water, electricity, and municipal taxes as of January 1, 2025. According to the 22nd edition of Latet’s annual Alternative Poverty Report, one of Israel’s most significant publications addressing poverty, the rise in the cost of living has forced the most vulnerable families to seek an additional NIS 10,000 in annual income – an almost impossible challenge.
- A significant reduction in the country’s social spending due to the implementation of a war economy. The need to finance the military effort has led the government to impose across-the-board budget cuts for the 2025 budget. This broad reduction, if confirmed, is expected to severely impact social spending. By cutting hundreds of millions of shekels from social ministries such as welfare or health, the government deepens injustice, forcing impoverished populations to bear a financial sacrifice that is equal to or even proportionally greater than that of other segments of society for the war. The same incomprehensible logic applies to the decision to raise VAT, the most unfair tax of all.
The combination of these events is expected to soon lead to a massive increase in poverty rates, particularly with the termination of state subsidies linked to the war, scheduled for next June. Failing to act to prevent such a situation would amount to granting our enemies a victory on the social front.
There is still time to demonstrate boldness, imagination, and political courage to implement the necessary decisions and avoid such a disaster.
Solutions to drivers of poverty
The solutions exist, and they are well known, such as increasing social allocations or by implementing recommendations from the 2013 Elalouf Committee on the war against poverty in Israel. The economic resilience of our country, after 16 months of war, has shown us that financing bold measures against poverty is possible under two conditions:
- Reviving a sense of distributive justice that the state has long abandoned. This involves a profound reform of Israel’s tax system. The goal is not to undermine the foundations of Israeli economic liberalism or the incentives for entrepreneurship but to reinvent a mechanism for wealth redistribution and inequality reduction that remains faithful to the spirit of the founders of Zionism.
- Building on the unprecedented wave of solidarity witnessed since October 8. The exemplary mobilization of our citizens at the beginning of the war demonstrated that solidarity and empathy can serve as powerful levers to strengthen social cohesion.
Let us remain faithful to the spirit of October 8 to preserve our country’s social cohesion and secure our future as a nation.■
The writer is founder and president of Latet, Israel’s largest organization dedicated to fighting poverty. For the past 29 years, it has worked to support vulnerable populations across the country. The majority of Latet’s resources come from private Israeli contributions, making it a symbol of Israeli philanthropy. In 2024, Latet distributed aid valued at over NIS 279 million.