c. 2003 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM _ Under a blazing afternoon sun earlier this summer, a rag-tag assortment of single mothers and children sat at the entrances to white canvas tents lining the sidewalk in front of Israel’s Finance Ministry.

They were locked in a battle with the well-paid bureaucrats across the street for what many believe is the soul of the Jewish state.

Their demonstration, which embarrassed the government and for a brief moment captured the imagination of the Israeli media and public, was sparked by the pilgrimage of one woman, 43-year-old Vicki Knafo. Early in July, Knafo, a single mother with three children, set out on foot from her home in the remote Negev Desert to walk the 100 miles to Jerusalem to protest a series of drastic cuts in parent welfare allowances that threatened to leave her destitute.

Soon she was joined by others _ women with small children, women pushing their disabled children in wheelchairs, and some men as well _ making the trek on the hot and dusty roads to Jerusalem’s government headquarters from distant towns in the Negev and the Galilee.

Like other pilgrimages to this ancient city, Knafo’s trek resonated in the hearts of the public, prompting both soul-searching and political activism.

The primary target of the campaign is Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a suave, American-educated politician and former prime minister.

Late last year, just after the right-wing government of Ariel Sharon had taken office, Netanyahu unveiled a Margaret Thatcher-style plan for radically reforming Israel’s economy.

Netanyahu’s program included broad salary cuts and layoffs in the public sector, legislation reducing the power of Israel’s Histadrut labor union, tax cuts for the middle class and, finally, a drastic reduction in income support payments that single parents, most of them women, receive while their children are still minors. The plan was billed as an attempt to confront the economic decline triggered by the Palestinian intifada.

But it was also the most dramatic statement to date that Israel was breaking with its old identity as a socialist welfare state of the kind envisioned by its founding matriarchs and patriarchs.

“For generations, one of the most important features of Israel was the value of mutual aid and charity,” said Aharon Cohen, a religious Jew who heads an agency that distributes food coupons to the needy in Jerusalem, and who stationed himself at the single moms’ protest site.

“Now, all of a sudden in one fell swoop the politicians have gotten rid of the whole system. We see more and more families coming to us in need, families that literally don’t have more than bread for a meal.”

In its early years of existence, Israel was a relatively Spartan, egalitarian society that valued hard work, frowned on undue displays of wealth or frivolity, and offered a secure social welfare safety net to the needy. That ethic of collective responsibility was a traditional Jewish value, an effective political strategy for survival and a logical continuation of the late 19th and early 20th century social reform movements and ideologies with which many prominent European and American Jews were identified.

“The founding fathers of the state of Israel were people who saw themselves as socialist Zionists and expected to create a country with a very high level of social and economic equality,” said Gershom Gorenberg, a social and religious commentator.

But over the past two decades, the Histadrut labor union, an institution that played a key role in the building of the early Israeli state, has been in decline along with its political affiliate, the Labor Party. Worker-owned companies have been sold off to private entrepreneurs. The kibbutzim, flagships of socialist Israel a generation ago, are undergoing a transformation to more privatized economies.

Government economic policies have favored an unhealthy reliance on low-paid Palestinian and foreign workers who are themselves exploited, and who drive down salaries in fields like agriculture, construction and manufacturing. Meanwhile, government investment in public sector fields like education, health and social work, in which many women typically work, is shrinking.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the dramatic nature of the changes under way, the schism between rich and poor has also grown immensely _ to the point it is now one of the widest in the developed world.

Netanyahu failed to anticipate the rage his plan would provoke among the poorest and most downtrodden sectors of Israeli society, including unskilled and semi-skilled laborers and single-parent families, many of them working in minimum wage jobs on Israel’s periphery, like the Negev’s Mitzpeh Ramon, where Knafo lives.

As in many countries, when welfare is cut, it is women who suffer the most. Although 70 percent of Israeli women with young children work, they earn, on an average, only 52 percent of what men do, clustered in low-paying vocations such as child care, food services, domestic labor and factory work.

Enter Vicki Knafo, a 43-year-old mother of three who earns $273 monthly as a part-time cafeteria employee in the desert town of Mitzpeh Ramon. In mid-July, after receiving notice her child support and welfare supplements were being cut from $704 to $408 monthly, she decided to walk the walk.

“The State of Israel encouraged me to have children, and expected me to take care of them. Children here also go into the army, and serve the state. The state, in turn, must help out in a time when no jobs are available,” Knafo said during her demonstration.

The women’s stark protest has triggered a new public discussion regarding not only the growing gap between Israel’s haves and have-nots, but also the hypocrisy of the political leaders who have called on the public to tighten its belt.

Whereas Israel’s early founders set an example with their modest lifestyles _ Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, retired from public office to a simple hut in a remote desert outpost _ today’s top government and ministerial officials, from Sharon to Netanyahu to the Labor Party’s Ehud Barak, are all conspicuous consumers of wealth and privilege.

In the most optimistic outcome, Knafo’s protest may be the beginning of a new Israeli social coalition that would transcend the old political divisions of left and right or religious and secular, some observers said.

“The division that had existed until now between left and right has been reshuffled,” Hannah Kim, a columnist for the Ha’aretz daily, wrote recently. “The leadership of the Jewish settlers are in the same boat as the capitalists and wealthy leftists _ along with Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On the other side, the ultra-Orthodox and moderate Orthodox are finding themselves together with decidedly secular people from the left and people from the towns on the periphery who for years voted for the right. Vicki Knafo for instance.”

DEA END FLETCHER