I well remember Britain’s winter of discontent quite a long way back in time now in 1978. My most vivid memory is of seeing a ‘Green Goddess’  fire engine arriving at a blaze in a block of apartments only 100 metres from our house. The sight of 1940’s fire fighting equipment operated by the army was astonishing, but came as a result of the fire service having gone on strike together with nearly all other public sector workers in protest at having their annual pay rise capped at 5%. Oh to get a 5% pay rise these days; that would be very special indeed.  


Memories of rubbish piling up in the streets, doctors and nurses  on short-time, fire fighters, gravediggers and lorry drivers all downing tools, have all come flooding back during the last week as Israel appears to have set out on its own modern version of the old theme. A long-running dispute between Israeli doctors and the government appears to have come to a head with doctors now going on strike at the ridiculously low levels of pay they receive from the government. 

 
For a country whose health service and general standards of medical care are, in my opinion, far in advance of most treatment I and my family received during our time in the UK, it is with real sadness that I see such disillusionment and lowering of standards because of a squeeze on health service budgets. But how can this be when Israel is supposedly in the midst of an economic miracle? We’re one of the few countries in the world who have enjoyed relative boom times whilst most other nations teetered on the brink of collapse, and we’re likely to be ‘rolling in it’ over the next 20 years as the massive gas and oil resources found offshore last year start to be piped in and sold at a huge profit.

 
So how can it be that a significant percentage of doctors after many years of training and more years in practice, reportedly take home no more that 8000 shekels a month after tax – that’s around $2,500 or £1,500 per month– in a country where the cost of living is higher than the UK, far higher than nearly all parts of America or most other countries for that matter? Where is all the money going? Who is in charge of the health service?

 
Just a minute! No-one wanted the Health Ministry portfolio (because they can’t massage the budget to appease political allies and constituents) and so, despite Israel's present cabinet having the largest number of ministers in its history – 30 – it was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who added that portfolio to his collection that also includes being Minister for Pensions, and Minister for Economic Strategy. Just a minute! That means that he’s in charge of overseeing the deals with the oil and gas companies who have found the second biggest fields in the world and are going to make us all rich. Of course, that is unless you are a doctor or a nurse, or a pensioner.

 
Something stinks! Doctors are demonstrating and calling spontaneous strikes at hospitals around the country and now the leader of Israel’s Medical Association, Leonid Eidelman, is to begin a hunger strike which he intends to continue until a wage deal that is acceptable to his members is reached. How sad that Netanyahu has allowed this dispute, (lasting some 128 days at the time of writing), to go on for so long. I venture to suggest that he would have been much quicker to put his hand in the treasury‘s pocket and find the funds needed if the protestors had been ultra-Orthodox Haredis, the people whose support he relies on most to shore up his tottering coalition.

 
Talking of the religious sector, today’s news reports of ultra-Orthodox protestors joining the secular youth demonstrating across the country at the lack of affordable housing in their protest outside the PM’s office in Jerusalem, was a very welcome and very rare sign of cross-religious/cross-political support for a situation which I have highlighted a number of times over the last year, namely the massive rise in house prices which bears no resemblance to the amount most ordinary Israelis can afford in mortgage repayments.

 
Protests started last week as a tented city emerged overnight on Rothschild Boulevard in central Tel Aviv, with similar sit-in’s springing up almost immediately in other towns such as Haifa and Be’er Sheba, before the Jerusalem village appeared on the scene earlier today. There was also a rally in central Tel Aviv at the weekend that attracted more than 20,000
supporters, according to media reports. 

 
Although the secular youth and ultra-Orthodox communities have arrived at the protests from very different angles – the secular camp from the point of view of working people whose wages fail to give them any hope of ever buying even a modest property, whilst the religious protestors find their situation worsening rapidly due to the majority of families having no wage earner (as they prefer to study in religious institutions whilst producing as many as 14 children a family) – the fact remains that these two very disparate worlds have seemingly found a common cause.

 
I would suggest to those secular youth (for whom I and many, many other Israelis have tremendous sympathy), who feel uneasy at the presence of the ultra-Orthodox suddenly emerging in their corner, that strange as it might seem, their presence is more likely to bring about a change than any number of non-religious, centre/centre-left modern youth demonstrating en masse, because the religious lobby is many times stronger than that of Israel’s secular society. If the ultra-religious rabbis join the cause for affordable housing and mobilise at the drop of a ‘black hat’ tens of thousands of black and white bedecked supporters, Netanyahu, fearful of danger to his coalition, will reach for the cheque book or push a bill through Knesset faster than you could dance a hora at a Jewish wedding.

 
The sad truth is that when it comes to political power in Israel nowadays, it is the religious right who hold all the aces, not the secular, taxpaying, centre, modern orthodox, or the left wing.


 
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