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| Arab kids aren't a joy |
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| By Ruth Sinai |
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Senior treasury officials, some say the
finance minister himself, were anonymously proud this week that the
cut in child allowances not only saved a lot of money, but also,
they said, caused a 3.4 percent decline in the birthrate among
Israeli Arab citizens. The treasury was more modest about another of
its accomplishments: in 2003, the year in which the cutbacks in the
child allowances went into effect, the number of poor children in
Israel rose by 31 percent. |
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| Israel
leads the Western world in the number of poor children. The last two
years have been among the worst those children and their parents
have known. If indeed there was a decline in the birthrate in 2004 -
and the data is still lacking on that score, despite the bragging in
the treasury - it's no wonder that there was.
After six years
of stability, there was a significant rise in 2003 in the number of
poor families. Not only were their child allowances cut, so were
their guaranteed income allowances, aid for housing rent and
discounts they had for city taxes. If the growth in unemployment and
the increased costs of health care and education are added to the
mix, clearly there were couples who decided to postpone planned
children or even marriage.
Thomas Malthus's theory of
demography, which anticipated in 1798 that if the world's population
continued to grow there would not be enough resources to feed it,
has found new disciples in the treasury building. Malthus also
believed that helping the poor encourages them to dangerously
reproduce. But in the 200 years that have passed since then, there
has yet to be any discovery of scientific evidence that starving and
punishing the poor causes them to have fewer children. The only
country in the modern world that used punishments to limit births -
China - has not enjoyed dazzling success with it. The number of
children in the cities has declined, but in the rural areas it is
still 2.5 per couple.
The fertility rates of Jews and Arabs
have both been in constant decline for years in Israel, irrespective
of the socioeconomic experiments the government has been conducting
on people in the last two years. The decline is the result of
social, cultural and economic factors: a rise in women's education,
their integration in the workplace, privatization of educational and
health services that make the expenses incurred by children more
expensive, and other factors. A similar process is taking place
throughout Western society.
In trying to halt the shrinking
population, Western governments are looking at various instruments
to encourage people to have children. In Italy, where the fertility
rate is now the lowest in the West, they encourage people to do
their patriotic duty and have children, going so far as to pay a
bonus worth NIS 5,000 to a couple that brings a second child into
the world.
It is too soon to know what effect such efforts
will have. So far, the research shows that the connection between
economic incentives and increased childbirth rates is at most
marginal. A study done last year by Ronni Frisch from the Bank of
Israel showed that fertility rates have remained the same among
Druze and Bedouin since 1986, even though some received
significantly more money in the form of child allowances starting in
the mid-1990s, when the discrimination against them compared to army
veterans was dropped.
If the treasury really wants to improve
conditions for the weaker populations, as it claims, and thinks that
direct aid to families keeps them unemployed and having babies they
cannot support, it should take the money it "saved" by cutting
allotments and give it to those families in the form of educational,
health and welfare services.
The director general of the
National Insurance Institute, Yigal Ben Shalom, has been pressing
the finance minister for months to do so, but the cynical and
demagogic behavior of Benjamin Netanyahu and his staffers proves
that is not their intention. They are proud that they "healed" the
economy and sent "the parasites" to work. And into the ears of the
political patron of the ultra-Orthodox parasites they whisper that
the cost of the cutbacks was worth it, because it reduces the number
of Arabs, and everyone knows that Arab children are no joy.
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