Continuing this thread on Israeli settlements, I ran across this article from an angry Akiva Eldar in AL Monitor concerning funding distribution in Israel these days:
In a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the [Union of Local Authorities] warned that a planned 230 million-shekel ($60 million) cut in the budget of the Interior Ministry, which funds local governments, would result in the collapse of some of these weak municipalities in Israel’s “social and geographic periphery” and directly affect the services they provide to local residents. The cut stems from a Dec. 18 government decision to slash 1.25%, or 1.2 billion shekels ($313 million), across the board from its annual spending over the next two years, including on health, welfare and education services. …
In accordance with a policy that proves that crime pays, the public coffers, meaning the inhabitants of Israel, will lose another 130 million shekels ($34 million). That’s the price tag of getting a few dozen criminals living in the unauthorized West Bank outpost of Amona, on stolen Palestinian lands, to obey a court order to vacate their trailer homes and move to an adjacent hilltop also not under the sovereignty of their state. In northern Tel Aviv, across from the railroad station on Arlozorov Street, dozens of law-abiding citizens live in frayed, rain-drenched tents (forced out of apartments they could no longer afford). No one offers these homeless Israelis an iota of the aid that the government is pouring into the “legal” settlements — as the government calls them, in defiance of international law — in the occupied West Bank and the outposts there. The price of the deal with the settlers of Amona also includes the cost of demolishing dozens, perhaps hundreds of houses built without permits by Arab-Israelis in their communities within Israel’s sovereign borders. According to recent reports, that’s what Netanyahu promised the Jewish lawbreakers from the settlement movement in a compromise outline for the evacuation.
In the post-shame era, the government doesn’t even bother concealing the source of the millions that it will hand over to the Amona squatters. The Finance Ministry proposal presented to the Cabinet said the budget cuts are needed, among other things, to fund the Amona deal. One might say that 130 million out of the 230 million shekels being cut from the budgets of 190 disadvantaged local councils are destined for distribution to 40 squatter families. Truly distributive justice.
Lately I’ve been seeing religious groups as simple power structures, hierarchies built on notions of supernatural beings. The purported inclinations of those beings, deduced from subjective experiences, writings of mystics, and out and out fraud, are used to build the rickety ladders of the hierarchy, climbed unsteadily by the ambitious and power hungry.
The dangers of building a power structure on anything but reality – actions are taken on twisted, unshared notions of justice and right, damaging those truly in basic need, while those whose only need is satisfaction of religious sensibilities get the resources destined, in the case in Israel & by any sensible being, for the first group.
Humans are social creatures, drawn to groups for protection. Here we see a nation, originally secular, but transforming into a religious nation, which is no longer protecting its citizens, but only those favored by the power structure in place because those favored have chosen to climb the ladder already surmounted by those in power. The favor is bestowed upon only certain subgroups, and so does Israel betray those most in need, and brings shame upon itself.
All this assuming Eldar’s assertions are facts. I’m in a particular mood this morning.
On another tack, I notice that categorizing groups into power structures thrusts atheists back into a position that some of them detest. They often protest that they are different from religionists on the basis that they do not believe in God (or, like me, do not know, although based on lack of evidence, the position of the religionists seems grim). However, as they form their own groups, even as they’re based on their vision of reality, unexpectedly slippery as that can be (compare the a-religious philosophies of libertarians and communists – both supposedly based on reality), they are forming just another power structure. Built to protect, operating as a competitive arena in some form, the differences only lie in their underlying assumptions; the outcomes may measure the conformance of their vision of reality with reality itself.
