ISRAELI MOMS PROTEST ECONOMIC SQUEEZE
The newspaper Yediot Ahronot [Hebrew for the "Latest News"] reported July 18 that single mothers in Israel staged a cross-country march on Jerusalem against the economic reforms that include downsizing their welfare benefits. They march by foot from all over the country.
The Finance Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, attacked the welfare program in an interview with Yediot Ahronot: "When you live on donations, you live in misery. The children of women who live on welfare learn from them how to beg. Women on welfare become accustomed to not working, and their children become accustomed to their mothers not working. It is a dependency trap, like a thick jam, that is hard to escape. In such an environment the children learn from the adults to beg and to ask for help. I look at them and I think, God Almighty, a new generation of welfare recipients is growing up here. I have to free these children from welfare culture. So they wouldn't become part of the chain. A woman can operate a crane in a construction site. A woman can work in packaging. A woman that can march 200 kilometers to Jerusalem can do that."
In the same newspaper, Meir Shalev suggested the mothers should have marched through the West Bank, because that route would be "more relevant and educationalÉ [T]hey would see places and territories that are the most important to the understanding of their situation. I don't mean only the roads and the military bases and the fences and the check-points and the outposts that absorbed the monies that are missing elsewhere. I mean that they could have seen the places that have transformed the values of the society in which they live, that ossified the hearts that have turned priorities upside down"
One page later, B. Michael writes on the same subject: "The rebellious women; they must be bombed. From the air. Maybe also from the sea and the land... I assume there will not be a shortage of helicopter and F-16 pilots who will agree to follow such an orderÉ Indeed, it is likely to assume that among the dead there will be children who are allegedly innocent. But you should not forget that they were also part of the subversive struggle, and therefore there is no room to be righteous about them."
He claimed that the "greedy hand" of the protesting mothers could send Israel down an economic "abyss." It was uncertain if his remarks were intended as sarcastic. (Trans. by Nirit Ben-Ari)
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9:51:27 AM 
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