Who’s the poorest in the land?

The economy gets top media billing today, with budget cuts and tax hikes finding approval in the cabinet, and bad news about the poverty rate earning prime space in the papers. Besides that, the press also deals with increasing volatility in the West Bank and Syria, and neither bodes well.

Maariv gets down to brass tacks with soldiers’ accounts that the army is not doing enough to combat Palestinian riots in the West Bank and is leaving the soldiers helpless in the face of danger. “In dozens of incidents of unrest, stone-throwing, and Molotov cocktail attacks on soldiers, they charged, the IDF’s approach was silence, ignoring, intransigence, and flight.”

“You just stand and watch the stones fly,” the paper quotes S., a 40-year-old reservist from Ra’anana as saying. “You say, ‘Yalla, this is going to hit me, it almost hit me, it didn’t hit. Go figure.”

The paper reports that the soldiers who spoke to it about this inaction in the face of Palestinian violence came from a broad variety of ages, backgrounds, and units serving in the West Bank. Their biggest charge is that the rules governing opening fire in the West Bank are “ambiguous, vague, incomprehensible and unclear.”

“According to [the soldiers], the instructions don’t permit them to deal with unrest, stone- or firebomb-throwing” by Palestinians,” it says. E., 29, of Tel Aviv, recently performed reserve duty in the West Bank and said, “We returned with three lightly injured, one in the chest, two in the legs. It’s only a matter of time until a disaster happens.”

“You do reserve duty as the Palestinians’ clown. It’s outrageous. It’s degrading.”

Alongside the exposé the paper reports that 10 soldiers were injured during Nakba Day clashes.

Because of Wednesday’s holiday, Israel Hayom is living in the past, reporting on the government passing the proposed 2013-2014 budget. According to the paper, 21 ministers backed the financial plan and only Environmental Protection Minister Amir Peretz voted against it.

The bill will now move to the Knesset Finance Committee and then to the Knesset floor. “The budget submitted by Finance Minister Yair Lapid included cuts and tax packages amounting to a total of NIS 46.9 billion in a year and a half, the largest effected since the austerity years of the 1950s,” the paper writes. “The ministers even decided to add broad cuts to their ministries, excluding the Defense and Welfare ministries.”

The rest of the ministries face a 2% cut in 2013 and a 3% cut in 2014, it reports. The paper also includes a brief module which asks “Will things really be better in two years?” in which it addresses questions analyzing the long-term effects and worth of the budget cuts and tax hikes imposed by the government. The bottom line? The classic Israeli expression: Don’t worry, it’ll be alright.

Regarding the ever-present threat on the northern border with Syria, Haaretz quotes a senior Israeli official’s first admission of Israel’s attacks on Damascus to The New York Times, saying that “If Syrian President Assad reacts by attacking Israel, or tries to strike Israel through his terrorist proxies, he will risk forfeiting his regime, for Israel will retaliate.”

The paper also reports that Israel has the highest poverty rate among the 34 member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). According to the paper, 20.9 percent of the population was below the poverty line in 2010, compared to a mere 13.8% in 1995 (Maariv and Israel Hayom put the latter figure at 14.5 and 15.3%, respectively). Israel also has the fifth-highest unequal distribution of wealth in the OECD, which the statistics show, according to the paper, “came as a result of the global economic crisis.”

Yedioth Ahronoth runs the same story with a somewhat misleading headline on its front page, “More poor [people] than Mexico,” and again on its article, “No. 1 in poor people.” The paper writes that “senior Israeli economic [officials], including former finance minister Yuval Steinitz and Finance Minister Yair Lapid, often recall Greece and Spain” as countries whose economic situation Israel must not replicate.

“But at least regarding their poverty rates, their situation is much better than Israel’s economy: Spain is ranked seventh with a poverty rate of 15.4% and even Greece is only in 10th place with 14.3,” it writes. Yedioth devotes its first eight pages to economic matters and how the new budget cuts and tax hikes will affect Israelis.

Haaretz quotes Hebrew University Professor Momi Dahan saying, “One of the principal explanations for the growth of poverty in Israel lies in the reduction of aid given to the lower classes because of the economic plan of 2003.” He added that the current budget follows in the footsteps of its predecessor and makes further cuts to welfare benefits to the lower classes, hinting at the possibility of more Israelis dropping below the poverty line.

Israel Hayom quotes Welfare Minister Meir Cohen (Yesh Atid) saying in response to the report, “There is no doubt that the steady rise in poverty in Israel in the past eight years testifies that there is need for significant change. Poverty is an existential threat of the first order and we need to address it.”

Maariv quotes the head of the Social Workers Union, Zafra Dweik, saying that the statistics are proof of poverty for the government and that Lapid’s latest budgetary measures “are only likely to increase the poverty rate.”