The budget battle book

The IDF chief of staff’s plan to trim down and become a leaner organization was met with a competing proposal that calls for major cuts to the pensions of career IDF officers. It’s that proposal, by the Locker Commission, that has the Israeli press up in arms on Wednesday.

According to Yedioth Ahronoth, three main issues separate the two proposals, that of Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot and that of the Locker Commission:

• The former seeks to reduce the number of career soldiers from 42,000 to 40,000, while Locker wants to slash it to 38,000.

• Locker wants to cut the mandatory service for men from 32 months (which just took effect this month) to 24 months in 2020. Eisenkot, however, recommended dropping it to 27 months in stages through 2023. Haaretz makes special mention of the proposal by the IDF’s manpower division that as part of the changes to military service, both men and women serve 27 months, rather than the current 32 for men and 24 for women.

• The most controversial of Locker’s proposals include massive cutbacks in career officers’ pensions, which has outraged members of the brass; Eisenkot’s proposal keeps most of the release benefits intact for veteran officers. Yedioth Ahronoth calls it “the war of the cutbacks” and says that “if they only had talked, perhaps it would have been possible to prevent the raging war waged right now over the future of the IDF.”

Yedioth Ahronoth comes out firing, saying that in a functional state, Eisenkot and Locker would have had a single press conference to present a single report containing proposals to cut the military budget. “But Israel is not a civilized country,” the paper says, and instead these two public figures “found themselves forced into an unnecessary collision — a collision that quickly escalated to loud tones and was accompanied by the hurling of serious accusations by ‘senior officials’ on both sides.”

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon attacked the Locker Commission report, which called for sweeping changes to the IDF’s structure and budget, saying it was “completely disconnected from the reality surrounding Israel and within it,” Haaretz reports.

“If the report is enacted, it will be a gamble on the security of Israel’s citizens,” Ya’alon said.

“Indeed, it won’t be implemented,” an anonymous senior IDF officer tells Haaretz. “It’s not legal; legally it won’t pass. If they discriminate against career officers in favor of other defense personnel, they won’t remain in the IDF a single day.”

Israel Hayom, however, devotes the most ink to the issue, covering the outrage over the proposed budget cuts through to age 9. The paper includes an outright sexist page 2 story in which it interviews anonymous women whose husbands are career officers, who say how hard it is to be a mother while their husbands are away — as if there are no women with careers in the military. One calls on the government “not to harm the pension terms and not to harm the motivation” of the officers by slashing their benefits. “Harming the terms of service and pensions of career soldiers not only harms families of career soldiers, but also the motivation to invest and enlist in long term service with the IDF,” one anonymous person tells the paper.

She emphasizes not what they make, but what they miss out on: holidays, weekends, family events. “A career soldier misses out on the first moments of his child, the first time that the child speaks or learns to walk,” the paper reports with no shortage of heart-string pulling.

“Most of the year I’m alone with the kids,” another woman says, listing off all the things she must do “like being a single mother” while her husband is away in the military.

While nobody else was looking, Haaretz reports, the Civil Administration — the military government running the West Bank — was set to approve Wednesday the construction of 886 homes in the West Bank, ending a de facto freeze in settlement construction. Hundreds of the proposed homes would be in isolated Israeli settlements, and it would retroactively approve the construction of 179 housing units built 20 years ago, the paper reports.

Buried in Israel Hayom, opposition leader Isaac Herzog’s comments that the disengagement from the Gaza Strip 10 years ago was “a defensive mistake” barely make a splash.