Idle hands make light work

And on the first day, the Voice in the Sky said: Let there be light.

So the Israel Electric Corporation sent round a team of ten: 1 light engineer, 1 electrician, a retired switch operator, his mate, the tea boy, the trainee, the PA, a union official to check that all was ok, and two extras, as ordained by clause 4.5(1)a of the Israel Electric How to Employ Anyone Manual. And they looked and they hummed and they hahed. Or even haahed. But mostly they hummed.

Eventually the engineer wrote a detailed report and had it sent to the New Lights Division, which read it, proofed it, photocopied it, analyzed it, sat on it, chewed it, and then put it into practice.

So finally, on the 245th day, there was light.

Of course that was just my little joke. I mean, whoever heard of an IEC engineer writing a report, and having a new light installed all within 246 days?

The Israel Electric Corporation, now there’s a sly one. They’ve been very quiet recently. Why make a fuss when they seem to be getting their way without much of a struggle, and the Bolshie workers at the Israel Railways are hogging all the limelight?

But I do believe our electricity utility needs a closer examination, just for the fun of it.

Your electricity bill, my friends, is about to leap. Yes, we’ve managed to get the cost of cottage cheese down, and even cartons of milk are facing competition. But electricity? Not bloody likely. We’ll have to wait for the next revolution for that one.

Come next Sunday, my blogpals, you will see your electricity bill leap by almost 9%. Yes, 9%. Halevai we should all be enjoying 9% pay rises. Inflation is running at just over 2% (thanks Stanley) on an annual basis, so what gives the IEC, a monopoly, the right to up our prices by more than four times the inflation rate?

It’s the price of oil, moans the IEC. That’s the problem. Higher oil prices, and a supply of gas from Egypt that keeps stopping every time revolutionary bandita, Mustafa Leak, has a tantrum.

Electricity does not grow on trees, it needs to be generated from some other form of energy - wind, sun, coal, oil, gas. The IEC has a supply of gas from Egypt, but apparently that’s not to be relied on. And when the gas gets turned off, the IEC has to turn to coal (expensive and very dirty, and not found naturally in Israel) or oil (also expensive, terribly difficult to remove if you get it on your overalls, and also not found naturally in bulk in Israel).

Now the IEC can’t just up prices, like so. Any change in its tariff has first to be approved by the Nameless Inefficient Committee of Mostly Politicians or Other Obsolete Penpushers, or NINCOMPOOP for short. So, the IEC, grumbling about high costs, unreliable gas supplies etc., goes running to NINCOMPOOP, (ok, so its real name is Public Utility Authority: Electricity) claiming it needs to raise prices by 37% just to keep solvent. Well 37% is over the top, even for a statutory monopoly, so after a chop here, a back-scratch there, a fuel tax jiggle somewhere else, approval was given for an 8.9% rise this year, followed by another rise in 2013 and another in 2014.

But where’s the incentive for the IEC to trim its fat? Why doesn’t the state set a price rise for electricity at say 3% (or the rate of the inflation), and tell the company to plan ahead and think of ways to make the company more efficient, less wasteful. It can be done.

When I was working on a building site in Jerusalem many years ago, we had to call in the IEC to move an electricity pylon. About five people turned up, and while two did the job, the rest sat on the side and counted their pensions or pointed at someone who actually did something for a living and laughed.

There is talk of changes in the electricity monopoly, but you’ll find that the IEC can dig its heels in fairly firmly when it likes.

Photo: solarenergylive.com

It took them years until they agreed to what’s known as net metering. In some countries, anyone can generate their own power, typically using solar panels. Usually you end up generating more than you need (or at least, more than you need at the time, because electricity cannot be stored). So the sensible thing is... wait for it, you’ll like this... you sell your surplus electricity back to the electric company! Your electricity meter goes the other way! This is known as net metering, and only several years after it was common practice in Germany (where they don’t even get enough sun for the solar panels), the IEC is now allowing the same thing here. Reluctantly.

The IEC had also set up a secret fund to finance all their happy perks: the holiday gifts for their workers, the free electricity for employees (current and retired), that sort of thing. But this was an illegal hoard, and last week the state ordered the company to take 90% of the funds from this kitty, and put it in with all the rest of their cash. 90% of what? How much do you think the IEC - barely able to scrape by, what with the high cost of oil and gas etc. etc.- had stashed away in this fund? TWO BILLION SHEKELS.

Think of that when you get your bigger bill next month.

O Wondrous Combustion Engine, Hallowed Be Thy Name

As an elderly couple are walking along the street in Tel Aviv, they notice a parking space. The woman steps into the space, stands firmly in the center of it, spreads her arms wide, and says to her husband “Quick, Bernie, I’ve found a parking space. Go and buy a car!”

That’s a smasher, isn’t it? A classic. It cracks me up every time. And that’s just one. I’ve got loads more when they came from. (Where did it come from? It may have been from inside a Xmas cracker, or, possibly from last week’s Purim party, where the jokes flowed like cava, and the cava flowed like... Well anyway, we had so much to drink, as is traditional for the festival of Purim, that jokes like the one above seemed hilarious, and everyone looked gorgeous).

Now if you’ve finished drying your eyes after that hilarious opening, let’s take a sober look at the shortage of parking spaces in our major cities, or, as is known in municipal circles, the council’s transport policy.
What exactly is parking? (A little too philosophical for this time of morning? Possibly. In that case, skip ahead to the joke at the end). Parking is a requirement (for those with cars), an irrelevance (for those without), a waste of space (for city planners), a cost (for everyone), and a subsidy (for tax-paying non-car-owners). I was once rung up by some market surveyor, and as an introduction to several mind-numbing questions, I was told that the subject would cover “Tel Aviv’s transport and parking policy”.
But parking is not transport, and it’s not a policy. Parking is a symptom of a lack of transport alternatives. We could just as well refer to the Ministry of Health and Burial of Operation Failures.
And yet many councils around the country, still stuck in the 1950s, believe the car is the answer to everything.

Today's riddle: How many parking spaces are there at Wembley Stadium? You know, Wembley, in North London, THE premier venue for football events and rock concerts too. The newly rebuilt stadium is state-of-the art, which means each seat has plenty of leg-room and there are umpteen toilets per person, so you should never have to wait long (bearing in mind that you'll be wanting to go at exactly the same time that several thousand other football fans want to go). It is England's national stadium, and the second largest in Europe. Seating and standing together, the stadium can hold 105,000 spectators. So, back to today's riddle, how many parking spaces are there in Wembley Stadium's official car park?

Now whilst the right side of your brain is thinking that one out, let's see what Tel Aviv has recently done for its residents. To great fanfare, the council sent to me (paid for by my money) a leaflet with an achingly funny title “I came, I saw, I parked”. It lists all the latest changes that will make parking easier. I can now park in several more official car parks at night for free, and at others at a whopping 75% discount. It lists similar benefits and perks for the car-owner. If only my council spent as much time, effort, money, thought, care and loving attention on the non-car owner, on those that use alternative means of transport!
On the contrary, it is practically the aim of the council to encourage us all to have cars.
Have you heard the one about... (no, sorry, I was going to tell a joke, but it would have been quite inappropriate)... have you heard about what’s known in Hebrew as תקן חניה (teken chaniya) or “the parking standard”? Basically it’s a requirement when you plan to build a house, an office block, or whatever, that the plans must include sufficient car parking spaces. Or else you don’t get the building permit.
Who determines what is “sufficient?” Good question, my blogfans, you are on the ball this morning. Who indeed?
One friend had a house built in some small town near Jerusalem, and it included a drive with one parking space. The council rejected this. He would have to include two parking spaces to get the permit.
David Azrieli, a seasoned Canadian businessman and mall owner, designed the towers (named after him) in downtown Tel Aviv. He chose the location well, at a transport hub, on top of the Hashalom train station. The original plans included a car park with plenty of spaces. The council (an unseasoned business operator and non-mall owner) told him the car park was too small, and he had to add several hundred more spaces to get his building permit.

Room for one more? Photo: parkinglotss.com

So are you getting the picture? If the government and local authorities spent as much time, money, and thought, on public transport as they do struggling to find more car parking spaces, we could, by now, have had a public transport system comparable to the best in the world. Then maybe we could dispense with the cars, and not even need the parking.
Wembley Stadium, if you were still thinking about it, is well served by London's transport system. It is accessible from three stations, served by three Underground rail lines, two overground lines, and a national rail link. More than 7 bus routes stop in the vicinity. And which is why Wembley, the rebuilt stadium, opened in 2007, has no official car park. It is, as they say on their website, a public transport destination.  

This is something up with which I shall not put

Which is the 57th highest ranked university in the world? Of course, we can all rattle off the top 35, but then it begins to get harder, doesn’t it? Well, the 57th top university is in fact the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Alumni (that’s Latin for "graduates") include Meir Shamgar, Sayed Kashua and Ada Yonath.
Now you're asking exactly what I asked too: How on earth do they rank a university? Is it by the quality of the sausage rolls served in the canteen? Or the fashionableness of the tassles on the caps of the post-graduates?
[Apparently it's based on how often their staff and alumni get articles published, and how many Nobel prizes they can snap up, if you really wanted to know.]
The Hebrew University held its ground-breaking ceremony way back in 1921. All the glitterati were there, all in their long coats, funny hats, round glasses, and inappropriate dress for the baking hot Middle East. Being in the inter-war period when Britain ran Palestine (as it was then) top Brits were invited too. Among these was the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, who had come out especially from London. He was an impeccably dressed, well-spoken young man, son of a British duke and an American socialite. His visit to the country made a very great impression on him. He was convinced that some modern miracle was in play, as the "children of the prophets," as he called them, made the deserts bloom and the modern state of Israel come into being.
Maybe he took something of the frontier spirit back with him to Britain. The young Secretary of State for the Colonies went on to further his political career, and, after switching parties, he became a cabinet minister and eventually Prime Minister. You may have heard of him. His name was Winston Churchill.
Inspired by him, some Israelis recently established the Churchill Society of Israel. Yes, only 91 years after his visit to the country, a society has been set up in Winston’s honour. Bear in mind that this is a country where 91 minutes after a visit from a Israeli cabinet minister, not even a folding chair would be set up in his honour. So that's some achievement. But then again, Winston was some man.

(Photo: Opening ceremony of the Hebrew University, 1925. Copyright 2009 www.middle-east-pictures.com)

The society, so it says on the packet, is to "foster leadership, vision and courage in Israeli society through the promotion of Winston Churchill's thoughts, words, and deeds." Apparently the tenets of Churchill's life--freedom, democracy, responsibility and Western civilization--are shared by society in Israel, though they could do with a gentle nudge now and again, which is where the society hopes to come into play.
But before they go swanning round the county teaching Israeli children how important it is to smoke cigars, throw themselves into wars fought half away across the globe, and try to get themselves captured for the sake of good copy, maybe we could draw some other significant lessons from Churchill's life.
Pay up or I'll…
When Churchill first became a member of parliament in 1900, politicians’ pay was zero. That's it, nothing. Bubkes. Bear in mind that Britain was arguably the richest nation in the world, and at the time, teachers in Britain were earning about £150 a year.
Let's compare that to our members of Knesset. A fresh, inexperienced politician in Israel today receives a monthly salary of NIS 36,000, that's over four times the average wage, which may be why they cannot begin to comprehend what crosses the minds of the ordinary taxpayer.
A little aside for a rainy day…
Churchill was prime minister twice, retiring in 1955, after four years in his second stint. He was 81 by this time. So what pension did he get, the man widely regarded as the country’s finest statesman? Again, nothing. In fact to support him in his final years, his friends clubbed together, bought his home and let him live there (rent free, how jolly decent of them) until his death.
Now compare that to the fat pensions we pay our politicians, including former cabinet minister and disgraced former president, Moshe Katsav. Why don’t you send him a letter complaining? (Address: Maasiyahu Prison, Ramla, Israel).
Defeated, but not down  
Israel does not have a constituency-based electoral system, and so politicians need only bribe, sorry, network within their own party to ensure a "safe" position on the party list. They then sit back and let the party stand or fall. There is no concept of personal responsibility.
Now look at Churchill’s example of personal responsibility and tenacity. As a youth, he failed to get accepted into Harrow school, twice. When he first stood for parliament in 1899, he lost. When he finally won, and still a sitting politician, his own local party deselected him (in other words, his own party told him they’d chosen a different candidate for that constituency at the next election).
He found another constituency, Dundee, but again, in 1922, he failed to be chosen as his party’s candidate.
He stood for parliament in Leicester. He failed.
He never gave up. Eventually he climbed up through all the political ranks until finally making it to Prime Minister. But in 1945, after the Second World War, he lost the election.
It is an incredible story of a man’s career. And yet in Israel a politician is never required to stand for an election based on the individual. It is the political party that carries the can. Knesset lacks outstanding parliamentarians and statesmen, maybe because they are not required to undergo personal scrutiny or constituency-based elections.
In the words of Winston Churchill (referring to the oddity of ending a sentence with a preposition), this is something up with which I shall not put.

Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side?

The three-day country-wide strike came to an end and all sides seemed happy. It was an historic achievement. It had highlighted solidarity of “strong workers with the weak” (quote by Histadrut Labor Federation chairman Ofer Eini), while the Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz had demonstrated “social sensitivity” (Eini, again) in the all-night discussions. The cost may ultimately have been great “but we are happy to pay it”, said Steinitz at the press conference. Smiles all round. I came over so warm and cuddly, I almost plotzed.

But could you, in no more than three rhyming couplets, tell me what the strike was about or what it actually achieved?

It was all about workers at the bottom of the rung, one could say; subcontracted workers. These are the ones that an employer (bank, government ministry, hospital, factory, even school, hostel, nursing facility) employs, instead of a permanent, fixed employee, because it’s simply cheaper for them. The employer approaches an employment agency, and in piecemeal fashion, asks for "Two nurses for three months, please. With chips, and go easy on the mayo."
This is becoming more and more prevalent throughout the country. Their pay is usually lower than those they work alongside. They do not enjoy job security. Their employers (technically, the manpower agencies) do not normally offer them pensions, nor other employment benefits, such as end-of-year bonuses or holiday gifts, or contributions to hishtalmut funds (tax-free employer saving plans).
And union boss Eini took advantage of fairly widespread sympathy for such workers when he rallied his troops, and shut the country down. He drew up a list of demands, which he'd only thought of last Tuesday though the trend of outsourcing has been growing for years. He called for scrapping the whole idea of subcontracted workers, bringing them into the permanent worker fold, and most importantly, he demanded they all be given the same gifts that their permanent work colleagues get every Rosh Hashana (New Year) and Pesach (Passover). Finance Minister Steinitz refused to accede to these demands. So the strike began.
There were no trains; there were no ships coming in or out of the country, in an economy that relies almost entirely on shipping for its exports and imports as we don't go in for much trade with our immediate neighbours for some reason, I can't for the moment remember why; mountains of uncollected rubbish piled up in the streets; Ben Gurion Airport froze all take-offs for one morning; and ATMs began to run out of cash (bank workers, bless their little cotton socks, came out in sympathy too).
The routine of millions was disrupted. Journeys were canceled. The cost to the economy was enormous.
It took two days and a marathon all-night session, until agreement was reached. By Sunday morning the strike was over, all sides were delighted. Eini praised the public for understanding that it was all for "social justice".

(Photo: nrg Maariv)

What tosh and bunkum.

Eini has a dream.
He has a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of the Histadrut's creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all public sector workers [but only public sector workers] are created equal." The labor federation in Israel, rather than rising historically from the downtrodden poor workers of society, is all about maintaining the incredibly cushy number of those in the public sector, who enjoy tenure (you can never sack them), salaries in excess of their true worth, and who look forward to bloated and, in some cases, "free" [i.e. non-contributory] pensions. The more workers he can get to join those sullied ranks, the stronger his position.
While the final agreement saw barely 600 subcontracted workers become permanent staffers, many more will find their wages and benefits linked to those in the public sector. And linkage is vitally important. If thousands of workers have terms of employment that are connected in some way to the sector that Eini controls, then this is all that matters.
So what happened to the poorly paid cleaners and security guards and bank tellers in the private sector? Well, yes, they’re sort of vaguely mentioned in the agreement. But please stop trying to change the subject.
Interestingly one of the “major” points was that the government agreed to employ a further 150 inspectors to ensure that the laws on subcontracted workers are enforced. How surreal. The public sector goes on strike to force the government to agree to enforce its own laws! Whatever next? Children going on strike to force their parents to feed them more green vegetables and less of the ice cream and chocolate, if you please?

A word about Steinitz, who caved in after two days, welcoming the extra cost of millions to the public purse: “Israel is the only country in the west that is making such a reparation, strengthening the weakest workers at this time.”
He should take a closer look at Greece. Despite violent protests, thousands on strike, and incendiary street battles, the Greek parliament this week passed what it considered to be the necessary, painful medication for a very sick economy: It cut 300 billion euro from public pensions, and plans to lay off some 150,000 public sector workers.
But Steinitz and Eini can hold their heads up high, for they know that when the going gets tough, the tough know what really justifies an all-out strike. They can pat themselves on the back, declaring that several hundred subcontracted workers in Israel will, come next Pesach, get that all-important bottle of wine and large box of chocolates.

The shopping may have ended, but something lingers on...

What is it about the fresh produce markets of Israel that makes me go back there week after week, come rain or shine? Am I attached to the market by elastic, unable to completely cut myself off? Is it the freshness of the produce - chickens that were still having breakfast not half an hour before I arrived? Could it be the camaraderie, the same cheerful faces that greet me each week? Or is it the stallholders’ friendly banter, and their inexhaustible knowledge, evident as they freely dish out their well-tried recipes for ragu alla napoletana, or olive tapenade?
Well, I may be exaggerating, but you just can’t beat those markets: from the veteran Shuk Hacarmel, and Jerusalem’s ever popular Machane Yehuda, to the more ethnic Shuk Hatikva. Now Tel Aviv has a newcomer, Shuk Hanamal. It's indoors, clean and modern, European and nouveau-riche. Some could accuse it of being too faltzani (פלצני - pompous), a local take on the Boqueria in Barcelona.
But these markets are indeed wonderful. On busy days, they’re heaving, noisy, and fun--far more so than your antiseptic supermarkets--and, thanks to heavy tax and import restrictions, they mostly sell Israeli-grown fruit and veg, hence the seasonality. None of these all-year-round pineapples and artichokes that you find incongruously on sale in Sainsbury’s, mid-winter, on the edge of the Pennines. In Israeli markets, summer means a plethora of peaches, plums, mangoes and apricots, while winter abounds with grapefruits, oranges, tangerines and strawberries. You're as likely to come across a watermelon in winter in the market as you are to find someone saying "Oh, I'm ever so sorry for bumping into you".
(By the way strawberries are winter fruits in Israel; they’re summer fruits in England, don’t you know).
Shuk Hacarmel, the largest, has been going strong since the 1920s. Shuk Hatikva, recently and sensitively renovated, is more spacious, and more comfortable to stroll through, though I find it has a more limited variety of products. The new market in Namal Tel Aviv is another kettle of fish entirely. Or another tureen of boillabaisse, as they would probably say there. It’s a culinary journey through the hills of Tuscany, the vineyards of the Golan, and the smoking kilns of Scandinavia, bypassing most of the Gush Dan region, if at all possible. It smacks of European chic, and in a nutshell, is delightful. On Fridays it expands, and outside includes a Farmer’s Market too, offering a smorgasbord of organic produce at prices that would make you weep before you’ve even started peeling your onions.

So where’s the rub? I hear you ask, in Hamlet’s words. How can it be that I’ve got nothing but compliments to dish out in this post? Have I changed my medication? Am I in love? Have I been accepting unmarked brown envelopes from the city council? (Halevai! They know where I live, but I’m still waiting...)

The rub is plastic bags.
Yes, we in Israel are deluged by plastic bags. In a bustling outdoor market one sees literally thousands of plastic bags being bandied about, when the rest of the enlightened world has moved on, having become more attuned to their inherent dangers. Research undertaken at the Technion concluded that Israelis use 5 billion plastic bags a year. Five billion! I’m gobsmacked! (There, that should confuse the Americans among you. Go figure!). These bags are environmentally unfriendly, taking over 400 years to biodegrade, and they can endanger wildlife, particularly sea animals if dumped into the oceans. In some parts of the world, consumers are now more aware of such negative environmental impact, and have switched to biodegradable. Legislation and consumer action have had drastic effects, whilst here in backwater Israel, even in the ever-so-chic and high-tech city of Tel Aviv, one is still dependent on the omnipresent plastic. Surely one day these markets will wake up, and with an eye to the enlightened consumer, they’ll wrap up your purchases in yesterday’s newspapers.
I’m sure my local grocer considers me a recently arrived alien from Mars, as I invariably insist on not requiring a plastic bag with every purchase. I can quite easily carry the cornflakes and the milk home in my arms, thank you. He always smiles at me, amused. These English, he’s clearly thinking, they have the oddest behaviour, I wouldn’t be surprised if they add milk to their tea.

Go one, have another one. Who's counting?

How much would you spend on a new dress? Or for you girls out there, on a new car?
Now how much would you spend if you were only going to wear/drive it three times? What if you were only going to use it once?
Yes, of course if you were not going to derive much use out of it, you’re less likely to spend vast sums of money on it, correct?
So keeping that idea of frugal efficiency in the front of your mind, let’s look at drainage design. Yes, I know. I can hear you all saying, “But that’s the fourth article I’ve read this week on drainage...” But bear with me, I’m sure you’ll learn something new here:)

Let’s say you’re the mayor of an Israeli town, let’s call it Mazkeret-Yankele-on-the-Galilee, and the town is in need of a complete overhaul of its drainage system, which is simply lots of large, generally tubular pipes, underground, that carry away rainwater. And Israel, for most of the year is generally dry (and hot and sunny, which is wonderful). So what size should the pipes be? Yes, you think this should be a straight-forward question for the City Engineer, only I forgot to mention that in our scenario the City Engineer for Mazkeret-Yankele-on-the-Galilee happens to be your brother-in-law who, though a fully qualified engineer with a framed certificate in Latin, lorem ipsum, from one of the finest technical colleges of Swaziland hanging on his wall, just by chance missed that lecture on pipe sizes. So he’s passed the buck to you.

Clearly the bigger the pipe, the costlier it is. One short pipe alone could cost thousands of shekels, so if you decide on a 50cm diameter pipe, instead of a 40cm diameter pipe, then the cost of the entire project could jump by millions.

A problem, true? Which is why you’re not an engineer in real life. Or probably why you’re not mayor either.
How does the engineer go about it? Well he takes a look at precipitation tables. Or, in other words, rainfall figures. How much does it actually rain in Mazkeret-Yankele? you ask. (This is a brilliant question, well done, maybe you should run for mayor). And thanks to the sterling work of the Israel Meteorological Service and friends, we have such tables. Now what?
Well the engineer can design a network based on a size of pipe that will be capable of dealing with the rainfall that occurs in a typical year, and in some not-so-typical years too. But according to the tables, maybe once in every 25 years there will be a storm of such magnitude that the drains will not be able to cope. There’ll be flooding, mayhem and havoc. There’ll be flotsam and jetsam, and then’sam. There’ll be calls for resignations, and lawsuits, and homes wrecked. Which could all be avoided if the engineer chose a larger pipe. Only that would be more expensive.
This now becomes not an engineering issue but a political and municipal one. The size of pipe, and hence the total amount spent on a drainage system, boils down to a question of: How often is the town willing to put up with flooding - once every 25 years? or, if Mazkeret Yankele was awash with cash, once every 50 years?

Now I may be exaggerating but sometimes it appears as if the drainage systems of some Israeli cities work on the once-in-a-year principle. In other words, the council chose a size of pipe that is able to deal with all rainfall up to, but not including those heavy storms that occur... um... well every year, actually. Our drainage systems work superbly for most of the year (i.e. summer), but fail to cope when it rains. Last week, it rained in Tel Aviv and I literally had to wade across King George Street, which had become King George River.

The same principle can apply to roads too, but here Israeli town planners apparently lean to the other extreme. A town has to decide how wide each road should be: It should be wide enough to deal with the traffic that uses it, but there are busy times of day (rush hour) or year (Independence Day) when traffic is heavy, and other times (nighttime) when it’s dead quiet. So how many lanes should there be? One can see plenty of examples of three- and four-lane roads crossing the country, which for most of the day are empty. Here’s one in Tel Aviv (photo taken at 9am on a normal workday, January 2012):

Would it not be more sensible to design narrower roads with fewer lanes, freeing up more space for housing, parks, public areas? And improve the public transport system that would reduce the expected traffic flow during those peak hours of the day?

It’s not such a crazy idea. Have a look at the House of Commons in England. This is the chamber where 650 members of parliament meet, discuss, argue and pass legislation, but how many seats are there? About 408 (It’s difficult to be precise as there are no individual chairs, but rather long upholstered benches). When the chamber was originally built in 1860, and again when it was rebuilt after being bombed in the Second World War, the decision was made that it should be that size. Why? Because most of the time, the chamber is bare. Not many turn up for the debates. And when there is something special on, having elected representatives sitting in the aisles, or on each others’ laps, simply adds to the atmosphere:)

I predict (and my prediction is being given here free, for you, no purchase necessary) that at some time in the future, we will see road-narrowing in Israel.

We shall fight them on the beaches and in the counting houses

Could you lend me 100 shekels? Let’s make that 1000 shekels. No sorry, I mean, 14,000 shekels, and I promise never to pay it back.

Sounds like a good deal? No, I didn’t think so either, but you’ve already done it, and you just didn’t know it.

Let’s assume you are an ordinary (of course, I don’t mean ordinary, in many ways you are spectacular and incredible, which is why you’re reading my blog, and why we’ve been friends for all these years), I mean, let’s assume you are a regular Israeli taxpayer. Well then you have given (and will give) thousands of shekels to pay for others who have either misplaced their money, or thought it would be far funnier if they got you (yes you, no not him next to you, YOU) to cough up.
I am of course referring to public sector non-contributory pensions, but if I’d written that in the first line, you’d have gone off and watched Downton Abbey. True? True:)

Now many people get put off by the word “pension”, and I agree, it hardly sets the heart racing. And if we add on “non-contributory”, well, even I nearly dropped off to sleep just typing it.

In Hebrew the term used is pensia taktsivit (תקציבית (פנסיה which is a wonderful euphemism. It literally means budgetary pension, which of course makes no sense to anyone at all. If they called it by the English term “non-contributory” then you’d begin to understand the problem, and at the same time it would rankle all those public sector workers who are generally having a laugh at our expense.

Let’s pick for our example a 43 year old, Dror Mishtalem, who works as a logistics officer in the Israel Defense Forces. He’s clocked up over 20 years of service in the army, and he’s soon to retire. Yes, you heard that correctly: Soon. Apparently permanent staffers in Israel’s standing army oddly become old and decrepit at an incredibly young age.
So let’s say Dror hits the ancient age of 46, and the IDF packs him off home with a pension. A pension that is determined by the size of his salary at the time of his retirement, and could easily be 10,000 shekels a month, which is greater than the average take-home pay of the typical Israeli (average salary is about NIS 8,100). And it also goes up every year, in line with inflation, noch. Plus, Dror could easily live till the age of 83, so that’s a good 37 years of retirement ahead.
In short, we’re talking about a pension worth more than 4 million shekels.
Where does this money come from?
Did Dror put some money aside each month? No.
Did his employers, the IDF, put some cash away for this inevitability? Wrong again.
Did the government, in its usual avuncular spirit, and with honed wisdom of thinking ahead, set up a fund to cover this vast sum? Pull the other one.
Then who?
Yes, you.

I think you should sit down. That’s it, have a cup of tea, or better still a stiff drink.
You, an honest taxpayer, on an average salary, are paying thousands of shekels to keep former engineers, accountants, typists, clerks, drivers, pen-pushers, officers, and maybe a few soldiers, in comfortable retirement.
Of course I say retirement, but that’s also a misnomer, because actually these people often do not retire.
Imagine you are 46, still fit, agile, capable, and by no means middle aged, and you’ve just been “retired”. You’re not going to sit at home and knit matinee jackets for the grandchildren. (Don’t ask - I’m not sure what matinee jackets are either, but Agatha Christie stories always mention them). Indeed, many former IDF staffers find new jobs almost immediately upon leaving their old ones. I used to work for an engineering company where the CEO, his deputy and the head of each department were all former army employees. And to tell the truth, they were all capable, professional individuals, that got things done. So why does the IDF dispense with them so early? Why are we paying for these people to retire so absurdly early that, despite the cushy pension, they often find themselves other jobs, with no doubt good salaries too.

Of course that NIS 4 million I mentioned is just for one person. There are thousands more like him, and most of this pension benefit is “unfunded” i.e. there is no kitty with all the money in it, but rather each month, every month, you--the taxpayer--pay in money which goes straight out again to retired army personnel. It’s called pay-as-you-go. I like that. It describes the situation well. Imagine if all working-age people in Israel suddenly got up one day and stopped working or left the country. Then the thousands of army pensioners would find they have no pensions.

So how much do all these pensions cost? Well there’s a slight disagreement here. Guesses range from NIS 100 billion to over NIS 400 billion, depending on who you ask. The army, by the way, won’t allow anyone near to assess how much it’s costing. So I conservatively took the lowest estimate. And that means a NIS 14,000 contribution each from you and you and you, hence that snazzy opening above.
Don’t be bedazzled by the Defense Minister’s waffling on about security risks, Iranian nuclear threats, and Hamas plotting. The army needs that money because it’s the largest unfunded pension scheme in the country.
And we’re paying for it.