Where in Israel is a war for survival taking place?

In negotiations with the Likud, we made a conscious decision to focus our efforts on changing policy towards small businesses.

We did this despite the fact that small businesses are the least connected, noisy factors in public discourse, and for a simple and obvious reason: they’re too busy surviving.

How hard is it to be a business in Israel? In the last five years, for every nine businesses that have opened, eight businesses have closed! Think about it. There is no better way to define their life than a war for survival.

In a war for survival, where losing a customer or an increase in a vendor’s prices can result in the loss of business, debts, layoffs, and a personal and economic jolt that can destroy lives, there’s no time for politics. No time for parties. No time to congregate, set up pressure groups, and organize buses on primaries day. There is no time, because you have to work. Because you have to create value.

And this creation, by the heroes who empower the private sector in Israel, is nothing less than the lifeblood of Israel’s society and economy.

More than half of the new jobs in the economy are produced by small and medium-sized businesses, the hidden heroes of the Israeli economy who are crushed under the brigade of bureaucracy and taxes of a country that abuses its heroes and holds insiders and cronies up as admirable.

In the past decade, public sector workers’ wages have risen at double the rate of private sector workers’ growth, unsurprisingly, at the same time as this huge, immoral transfer of capital away from small businesses.

In the last five years (2013-2018), an average of 5,000 businesses have been added to the economy each year, while the number of businesses opened each year was 48,000. This huge gap stems from the liquidation of businesses that failed to survive.

This insane low rate of survival is inevitable; it’s the result of an economic policy that has favored cronies and insiders over business owners over the past decade. The fact is that just a decade ago, from 2009-2011, an average of 10,000 businesses were added each year. And the number of businesses that opened in those years was the same as in the later period.

In our agreement with the Likud, we sought to solve the biggest problems of small businesses that want to make it:

Taxes and Bureaucracy.

The Green Line seeks to ensure that a business can declare compliance with bureaucratic requirements in order to obtain a license and not be subject to the capriciousness of the licensing authority, and the second, equally important law, seeks to allow the business owners to deduct start-up costs over the first two years of the business’s existence from the amount it must pay in taxes.

When we fought for and achieved this wonderful advance, we knew it wasn’t a politically wise act. We knew that small business owners who are busy fighting for their survival and building the Israeli economy have no leisure and ability to storm the TV studios, fill town squares, or organize a political appreciation campaign.

We knew this, and we chose to fight for them, in order to correct injustice, and to honor and assist the anonymous heroes who establish the strength of the Israeli economy every day.

In the upcoming elections, we’re going to vote for Zehut with a Machal (Likud) ballot, in order to establish a nationalist government that will fulfill Zehut’s understandings, and help small businesses build a better state.