Israel and the Current Capitalist Crisis

 

From the Communist Party of Israel

www.maki.org.il / interelations@maki.org.il

Israel and the Current Capitalist Crisis

by Daniel Rosenberg *

The financial crisis does not skip over Israel. The country that has been integrating itself in global capitalist markets in the last decades is once again seeing the ugliest side of capitalism, as the stock markets have dropped over a stunning 10 percent since the beginning of the month and the GDP growth forecast for the next couple of years has been slashed.

The crisis finds the Israeli society in worse shape than it was during the last recession, that of 2000-2003: currently about a quarter of Israeli citizens live below the official poverty line, among whom the percentage of minority groups, such as Israeli Arabs and orthodox Jews, is extremely high. A large part of the Israeli poor population are defined as "working poor," meaning people who are employed and yet do not earn a minimum living wage, a phenomenon which is usually regarded as a symptom of the crumbling of the middle classes.