Israel has a poverty rate of 21 percent, the highest among all OECD countries, a report by the economic development organization revealed last Wednesday.  The report, aimed at investigating the impact of the global capitalist crisis on developing countries, also found that the gap between the rich and the poor was very high in Israel, with only Chile, Turkey, Mexico and the United States exhibiting a higher gap. Iceland, Slovenia, Norway and Denmark were found to have the lowest rate of income inequality among the 34 OECD member countries. Israel joined the OECD in 2010.

However, Israel was found to have had a low increase in child poverty since 2007 compared to other OECD states, such as Turkey, Spain, Belgium, Slovenia and Hungary. Director of the National Insurance Institute (the Israeli Social Security) Director Shlomo Mor-Yosef told Ynet news website that the reduction in benefits as consequence of the neo-liberal social and economic policy of the Netanyahu’s government will see another 40 thousand families drop below the poverty line. “Today the families living in poverty barely survive. With the planned cuts – those in child allowances, VAT and other social services such as dental care and daycare subsidies – these families will not survive,” the official warned.

Demonstrator in with Hadash banner during the 2011 massive social protest in Jerusalem: “People before profits” (Photo: Al Ittihad)

According to Eran Weintraub, the director of the Latet charity foundation, poverty is the result of wrong government policies and national priorities. Only posing the problem of poverty as the central goal on the government agenda “will allow Israel to reach within a decade the average poverty rates in the OECD and halt the disintegration of society and the growth of the division between the rich and the destitute.”