I nicked these sugar packets from Ginzburg, my local cafe. I call it Zionist sugar because each packet displays the portrait of some historical figure who was connected to the building of the state, with a brief bio blurb on the reverse side. There are lots more (I didn’t want to be greedy, so I only took a few), featuring a wide range of writers, scientists, philanthropists and political activists. All are portrayed as idealists who were committed to the betterment of society. Well, there’s not much room for historical nuance on a sugar packet. For readers who don’t know Hebrew, the names are as follows:

Top row, l to r: David Ben Gurion, Joseph Trumpeldor, Theodore Herzl, Ahad Ha’am (pen name of Asher Ginzburg).
Bottom row, l to r: Eliyahu David Badash, Zeev Jabotinsky, Henrietta Szold and Moses Montefiore.

I’ve never heard of Badash, and neither has the Hebrew Wikipedia, but according to the sugar packet people he was among the founders of Karkur, which was a small town back then and is still a small town today. You can find information about all the other figures on Wikipedia. Henrietta Szold is my favourite; I discovered her when I was about 11, while avidly reading my way through a series of books about famous women in history that I’d discovered in the school library. Henrietta came in somewhere between Cleopatra and Madame Curie – which is not at all odd, given that I attended a Jewish parochial school.

While reading The Marker (Haaretz’s business newspaper) over yesterday’s morning coffee, I discovered that there might be a looming ice cream shortage. So tragic! Just when winter is starting, too. Apparently, Israel’s powdered milk reserves are nearly empty. For reasons not explained in the article, there has been a sharp rise in demand for dairy products over the past few months – even though the cost of milk has risen – and the cows haven’t been keeping up.

Wheat prices have been rising, too. But no worries – there’s no looming shortage of bread. It’s just going to become more expensive. For me, this is not a big deal. If the price of my crusty organic French country loaf from Lehem Erez, uber-purveyor of bread for discerning tastes, rises to $4.00 from $3.50, my lifestyle will not be affected. I, however, do not have to feed a family on a monthly income of $825 .

There are lots of neighborhoods in Israel where the local grocery store sells single eggs and half loaves of subsidized bread to people who live in a perpetual state of “food insecurity.” Once, when I made a small purchase at a dusty grocery store in Sderot, the proprietor told me sheepishly that he did not have change for my 50 shekel bill (about $12). He told me he’d had only a few customers since the morning, and that they had bought bread, eggs and milk on credit. He said most people in the neighborhood ran out of cash at the end of the month.

Subsidized bread has been a staple of Israeli life since the founding of the state. The government set the price and compensated the factory bakeries, which produced a wide variety of non-subsidized breads in addition to the brick loaf called, in Hebrew, lechem achid (לחם אחיד) – or standard bread. About six months ago, the bakery owners stopped producing subsidized bread for a few days in order to force the government into raising the price by 15 percent, which they said was necessary to cover the higher cost of wheat. So the price was raised from NIS 3.70 to NIS 4.30 per unsliced loaf – i.e., from slightly less than one dollar to slightly more than one dollar. Now, it seems that price controls on bread are going to be lifted altogether, allowing bakeries and shops to charge market prices. Haaretz describes this as a milestone in Israeli socioeconomic policy – and not in a good way.

The social justice theme was taken up by Channel 1, which broadcast a report about this blow to Israel’s poor on its Saturday night news magazine. Afterward, the reporter joined the anchorwoman in the studio, where he launched into a self-righteous tirade about the whithering sense of social justice and the indifferent Israeli bourgeois. Red-faced, his voice rising to a near-shout, he sneered at callous Tel Aviv yuppies and their bread stuffed with organic sun dried tomatoes. The poor anchorwoman was nearly cringing at this populist outburst. She finally had to cut him short before he started to pound his fists on the Plexiglas table.

Bread, of course, is just a symbol. Poor people with large families will feel the difference, because a lot of them buy several loaves each day to feed their large families. But surely the macro issue needs to be addressed. What steps need to be taken in order to raise 1.5 million Israelis out of poverty? How do we help them to benefit from Israel’s prospering economy?

Are Israelis becoming indifferent to issues of social justice?

It’s hard to say. There are so many battles to fight. At some point, outrage fatigue does set in – especially when there are personal lives to be lived. Besides the ever-present and ever-divisive issue of the settlements and the occupation, we’ve got Qassams falling practically every day on Sderot, a failing education system, a polluted environment, a rapidly growing wealth gap, failing municipal governments and – well, the list is long. Pick your issue, there are plenty.

There have actually been a few interesting example of social activism lately. Yochay blogged about the waiters at a Tel Aviv University campus cafe who went on strike to protest unfair tip distribution. A few weeks later, management agreed to meet their demands.

On the other hand, when the employees of Haaretz newspaper formed a union in order to push for little things like toilet paper and soap in the bathrooms (the lack of which was one of my pet peeves during my brief stint at the paper) and perhaps – if that’s not too much to ask – a salary that allows one to live decently, management refused to recognize the right of the workers to organize. (The union’s blog is here, but it’s in Hebrew only).

It seems rather ironic that Haaretz, which is supposed to be the voice of the liberal left intelligentsia, would refuse to recognize a union. But on closer inspection it makes perfect sense: the Marker, with its news about the prospering Israeli high-tech start ups, real estate market and VC funds, is now Haaretz’s main money maker (the newspaper was published at a loss for years). Not for nothing does the staff at the Marker have flash new computers while the staff on the news desk are lucky to snag one that has a mouse – let alone internet access. When I was a proofreader on the news desk we used to fight for a turn at the terminal with internet access, in a losing battle to do a thorough fact-check before deadline.

Shira has a report about the 100,000 Israelis who gathered in Rabin Square on Saturday night to demonstrate for the teachers, who have been on strike for 40 days. Check out her post for a summary of their demands and some excellent photos of the demo.

One of the teachers’ union’s slogans is, “cheap education is costing us a fortune.” So I’ll close this haphazard post (I was sure I had a theme when I started writing it, but it seems to have gotten lost and I don’t have time to look for it) with the not-very-original observation that a well-educated citizenry is more likely to find a job that gets them off public assistance and pays enough to cover the cost of bread. And ice cream, too. Discuss, if you wish.

I’ll leave you with one final thought: if there is a shortage of Crembos this winter, I might be inclined to go to the barricades.

Ynet video report on the making and consumption of the Crembo here.