Leave Bibi alone
Op-ed: Netanyahu has made his priorities very clear: Who cares that many Israelis will never own a home when Tehran is inching closer to the bomb?
Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the damning report
on Israel's housing crisis in the same way he responded to a report on excessive expenditure at the prime minister's residence: He brushed it aside, as though it were a triviality, an unimportant matter seized upon by petty people who have failed to deal with the real issues at hand.
I, your prime minister, have the weight of far more important matters on my shoulders – of life itself. So why are you talking to me about the despair of everyday life, about the hopelessness, about the people in their 30s and 40s who spend their whole salary on a delusional rent or who are forced to live with their parents. Why are you telling me about people who every year are further away from realizing their dream of buying a home, while Iran every year gets closer to becoming a nuclear threshold state?
And just like in the Likud election broadcast, in which someone enters the office of the prime minister every minute to inform him of yet another ridiculous affair that has infected the media, this was the air Netanyahu gave off on Wednesday, when he first responded to the report.
"We're talking about housing prices, about the cost of living," he said, "I will not for one moment forget the issue of life itself, of living, and that the greatest challenge we face is the threat of Iran arming itself with nuclear weapons with the declared purpose of destroying us."
The Netanyahus' home in Caesarea. (Photo: Shaul Golan)
In other words, stop bugging me about the high cost of housing and the high cost of living. Stop bugging me about the most critical problem in Israel, the problem of hundreds of thousands of young couples, working people, who have no chance of buying an apartment. This most simple of things, settling down, is out of their reach.
Israel in Crisis
Far-reaching report by State Comptroller Yosef Shapira lambastes government inaction, says crisis could lead to collapse of middle class in Israel and cause massive damage to economy.
Only someone who has a villa in Caesarea and another apartment in Jerusalem, and whose entire housing and living expenses are paid for by the public could be so cynical about the number one crisis facing his country's citizens. And why are we so surprised?
Just a week ago, we were treated to a virtual tour of the prime minister's residence and saw the landlady's worries about the state of her home. And it became very clear that the only housing problem of interest to the Netanyahu family is its own – in all three of its homes.
Netanyahu's statement, that it's one issue or the other, is steeped in cynicism.
It is impossible to deal with two issues at the same time, the prime minister is telling Israelis. It's either the Iranian nuclear problem or the housing crisis. You decide.
