Don't repeat America's mistakes
By Peter Edelman

27 October 2005, Haaretz

Buried in Prime Minister Sharon's speech to Israel on the eve of the disengagement was an extraordinary statement.

"The disengagement will give us a chance to look inside ourselves. The agenda will change," Sharon said. "Economic policy will find the time to address closing the social gaps and a real war on poverty."

A cynic might suspect that with the departure of Benjamin Netanyahu from the Finance Ministry, where he championed bringing Reaganomics to Israel, the statement was a rhetorical sop by Mr. Sharon to the left. Even if heartfelt, the Prime Minister's admission does not alter the threat of the latest questionable import from the United States - the so-called Wisconsin plan to move poor people from welfare to work.
Although I now serve as the board president of the New Israel Fund, I am no stranger to the welfare controversy in the U.S. In 1996, after President Clinton signed into law radical changes in the American welfare system, I resigned my position as assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services to protest his action. Now, with 10 years experience with this punitive law, I still believe that what we did to the working and unemployed poor in the United States with that legislation - legislation that contemplated approaches like the Wisconsin concept - was unjust and unfair.

Who can be against helping people get off welfare and find a job that takes them out of poverty? But welfare reform American style permits our states to push people off welfare - or not allow them to get help in the first place - whether or not they have a job or a good prospect of finding a job. That is not good public policy.

Israel is heading in the same direction. Ask yourself, how do you tell people they can be sure to find a job in a country that has 9 percent unemployment? How good is a policy of pushing people to take any job on offer when 20.8 percent of working families are poor and one child in three is poor? Last year, Israel's economy grew by 4 percent and the number of people living in poverty went up by 100,000. What is wrong with that picture? Israel clearly has a huge problem with jobs that don't pay enough to get people out of poverty, and beyond that, a problem of not enough jobs at all.

You don't solve these problems with a bumper-sticker policy that says, "Find a job or else." A sensible welfare-to-work policy helps people find jobs, offers child care and other support services, adds income to the earnings of workers whose wages are below the poverty level, provides transitional jobs for people who can't find work and makes cash assistance available to people who are not in a position to work.

Israel's Wisconsin plan seems to fail every one of these criteria. Outsourcing the plan's administration to private companies is a formula for disaster, especially when one of the companies is well known in the United States for cutting corners - and when the companies don't get paid unless they get 35 percent of participants off the welfare rolls in seven months. Moving more people into poverty is not an acceptable solution.

In the U.S., conservatives brag about how the number of people on welfare has dropped since welfare reform was instituted. What they don't tell you is that there were 37 million Americans living in poverty as of 2004 - over five million more than in 2000.

That's in large part because almost four million of the nine million people who left the welfare rolls in the U.S. don't have either a job or welfare. Just as in Israel, the U.S. now has one of the highest rates of income inequality between rich and poor in the developed world, and the inequities are only getting worse. Poor families with children have lost the guarantee they had for 60 years that, absent available jobs fitting their skill levels, they could continue to receive assistance until employment was possible.

We at the New Israel Fund are very concerned that the Wisconsin plan will lead Israel into making the same mistake. There are harsh sanctions against people who do not agree to work in jobs offered them, even if personal circumstances like health or child care make it impossible. There are issues in implementing the plan in an equitable way for minorities; already, according to our grantee The Laborer's Voice in Nazareth, the 4,000 unemployed Arab Israelis there are concerned about the city's inadequate job center.

In keeping with our long fight for social justice and economic equity in Israel, we intend to keep a close eye on the implementation of the Wisconsin plan. We have already provided small emergency grants to two organizations, Commitment to Peace and a Just Society, and Genesis Israel, to assist with their monitoring and evaluation of ongoing plan-related activities. These two organizations will gather and analyze information on the plan in order to report to decision-makers at the end of the pilot stage; provide a framework through which the experiences of plan participants can be heard; and raise public awareness about what the plan is or is not accomplishing.

As a nation founded on a vision of justice and equity as envisioned by the Jewish prophets, Israel must be very careful in the social engineering programs it chooses to emulate. In this as in other areas, looking to the United States as a role model may be a very bad idea.

Peter Edelman is the president of the board of the New Israel Fund, a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center, and director of a clinic focusing on poverty policy in Washington, D.C.