(And Why I Still Think the Cost of Living is the Elephant in the Room!)
Originally published on Medium
The strange living situation that the coronavirus has thrust us all into has provided me with a little bit of pause for thought about how my aliyah (immigration to Israel) has gone.
Five years in, I’m now well past the ranks of the rookies — although I’m still far from a veteran too.
I need to keep working on my business Hebrew — although I’m making some great progress at the moment (check out my YouTube video below for some slightly unconventional ways to improve).
I’m — to be transparent— unsure about whether it makes sense to continue living here (and have frequent thoughts about leaving!). (Side-note: Apparently so do many friends that have moved here — can be agree to start talking openly about this and stop repressing it like it’s some sort of dirty secret?)
RELATED LINK: Ireland vs. Israel (As Places to Live): Medium
But — paradoxically perhaps — I find myself reasonably happy and fulfilled while doing so and thinking about what might be next on the agenda.
Oddly, once you move past the rose-tinted glasses phase, you’ll feel that this is how many native Israelis actually experience life: A strange and seemingly conflicting mixture of contentedness coupled with fundamental unease with the country politically and economically (or sometimes both at the same time).
In “Israel vs. Ireland: My Thoughts After Five Years” I gave a̶ ̶p̶r̶e̶t̶t̶y̶ an extremely detailed overview of what I viewed as the pros and cons of living in Israel.
If you want to spend the next hour on Medium, feel free to check it out.
But assuming you have much better things to do, I could summarize it while on one leg as:
👍 Pros:
🌎 Universally applicable
- Great weather (and lots of sunshine)
- Good and very affordable healthcare
- Good food
- Falafel (it deserves its own mention)
- Good travel opportunities
🧔 Individual-dependent
Cultural factors.
Israelis are, by and large:
- Straight-talking and down to earth.
- There are comparatively flat hierarchies in the workplace.
- Israeli culture is fundamentally informal and Mediterranean in nature (although quite unfamiliar to those from more frosty Northern climes.)
✡️ Jewish-specific
- In Israel, it’s easy to lead a fulfilled Jewish life and (for Jews) to feel instantly “at home” among people from a similar cultural background
- For religiously observant Jews, it’s also easy to follow Jewish religious law; Israel is a society that is built around it rather than one which shifts to accommodate it (this is more applicable in religious cities such as Jerusalem, where I live)
- As a split-off from the preceding point: being Jewish is mainstream/the norm in Israel (I grew up in Ireland and was the only Jewish student in my high school! For some feelings about how much not feeling like a fish out of water means to me, again, feel free to check out the Israel/Ireland post)
- Feeling of resettling the Jewish homeland / contributing to Zionism / being a small part of a larger historical enterprise / and being among the first generations of Jews in thousands of years to live, again, in Israel
😮 Dependent upon your martial status and gender:
- Israeli women
- Israeli men
Cons:
Major
- Extremely expensive! CEOWORLD business magazine recently ranked Israel as the eight most expensive country in the world (original source). That ranking put Israel “ahead” of Hong Kong (yes, Hong Kong!), the US, and even Singapore.
- Property is particularly expensive and consequentially unaffordable for most young people — at least those without massive family help. To compound the problem, down-payments in Israel are set by law at a minimum of 25%. Because of the disparity between salaries and the cost of housing, the average number of mortgage payments it takes to own a property is notably higher than in many other countries. (Source — Taub Center for Social Policy Studies: “It now costs 148 monthly salaries to buy a home here, compared with 76 in France and 66 in the U.S”).
- For the 91% of society that doesn’t work in “high tech” (the technology sector) salaries that are not commensurate with the cost of living. Israel’s wage gap was recently found to be the highest in the OECD.
- Limited professional growth opportunities in many careers and outside of the startup world.
- Protekzia (the buddy system) which can make it hard for immigrants to get a leg up on the career ladder.
Moderate
- Fairly paltry vacation time for those often meagerly salaries. A 45 hour work week. And just 12 days minimum vacation per year for salaried jobs.
Minor / Only Sometimes Applicable
- Poor customer service
- Freier culture and societal mistrust. Read my blog because it’s a tricky one to explain.
- Middle Eastern haggling culture and how easy it is to be a freier (for more about that, see: Quick Facts About Working With Israelis)
- Cultural factors: Israel can seem very aggressive and loud compared to some more genteel climes. Perceptions of manners differ between countries, but — in line with the stereotype — many find that they can often be quite obviously lacking here! (This piece outlines the dynamic well).
- The security situation (yes, I’m listing that as a minor drawback as thanks to the advances that Israel has made in defense its impact on day to day life is far lesser than it was just a short decade ago).
Dependent Upon The Person
- The increasingly right-wing nationalistic direction of the government and concurrently diminishing chances for peace.
And I would coalesce that even further to:
a) Unless you work for a foreign employer or as a software developer, the cost of living is probably your biggest issue — by a very long shot.
b) There are other slightly annoying things about living in Israel (customer service that can be downright abusive, dirty supermarkets). But none of these are really deal-breakers (in much the same way that you probably wouldn’t want to leave Ireland just because some people can be passive aggressive rather than in-your-face like Israelis).
c) If you’re not Jewish a lot of the benefits go out the window. So scratch out that section from the “pros” list. Although Tel Aviv is still a fun town whatever your religious persuasion. And if you’re making a good international salary there the fact that beer costs $10 a pint shouldn’t bother you too much.
d) Depending on the strength of your commitment to Judaism and Zionism none of the drawbacks may matter to you at all.
A reading list about the cost of living
I therefore think that the major issue facing immigrants to Israel, like me, continues to be the cost of living.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that until it is normalized the difficulty of surviving in Israel economically — much less living a comfortable middle class existence — is going to continue to be the unspoken elephant in the room facing those looking to move to Israel. And especially those without generous and extensive family support and who are not among the 10% of the economy working in software development and related fields.
Because irrespective of one’s salary the cost of living is an equal opportunity discriminator — plaguing both those that make great salaries in the pinnacle of the “high tech” world and those on the other end of the spectrum struggling to make ends meet in the food service industry and making close to Israel’s paltry minimum wage.
In a country where the cheapest supermarket pizzas start at $5, new cars are subject to an 83% purchase tax and even IKEA furniture costs double what it does in Nordic countries there are simply always going to be a lot of expenses to keep up with whatever you do between nine and six.
The following are some articles (and excerpts from articles) that I think do an excellent job at illustrating the dynamic. Unfortunately, and despite the pervasiveness of the issue, the cost of living has been almost entirely disregarded during the three national election campaigns that have taken place in Israel over the last year.
Nearly 25% of Israeli Households Live in Perpetual Overdraft, Says Report (Calcalist Tech)
Of the 97.5% Israeli households that have a bank account, 42% have been in overdraft for at least one month during the past year — 1.1 million households accounting for about 4 million people, according to a new report published Monday by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS). Twenty-two percent were in overdraft 10 months or more of the year.
Sure you can make it in Israel — if your parents help, say economists (TOI)
Unless they are in the top 20 percent of income earners, Regev told The Times of Israel, or unless they already own significant assets, a typical professional couple making aliya from abroad will likely never be able to save enough money for a down payment on an apartment.
And:
Gilad Brand looked at consumer prices in Israel and found that relative to incomes, prices are higher here than in every OECD country except Japan
(Quote from Eitan Regev, Taub Center for Social Policy Studies).
And:
It now costs 148 monthly salaries to buy a home in Israel, compared with 76 in France and 66 in the U.S.
Israeli parents forced to support adult kids (The Media Line, Syndicated)
A new study by the Taub Center for Social Policy finds that 87% of all Israeli parents help their adult children with finances.
The “high tech bubble” inflates the national salary average, but:
Hi-tech sector exceeds 300,000 workers for first time (The Jerusalem Post)
The percentage of Israelis working in the country’s hi-tech sector rose to 8.7% of the entire workforce by the end of 2018, exceeding 300,000 employees for the first time, new statistics published by the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) has revealed.
(Obvious corollary: more than 90% do not work in the sector!)
And the wage gap between the high tech minority and the economy at large is quite striking.
High-tech workers in Israel earn an average ₪22,479 ($6,534) a month, more than double the average of ₪9,345 for workers in the rest of Israel.
And the cause of the low salaries outside of “high tech”?
Productivity per capita that has consistently ranked among the lowest in the OECD — particularly among disadvantaged sectors of the workforce and in protectionist inward-facing industries that have been artificially shielded from foreign competition (at the time of writing no major international supermarket chain operates in Israel):
OECD: Weak labor productivity hampering growth of Israeli economy (The Jerusalem Post)
And the root causes of the high cost of living?
Rampant monopolies, oligopolies accompanied by tight import restrictions and far-reaching government bureaucracy:
Monopoly nation: How a handful of firms control prices, hold Israelis ransom (Times of Israel)
My hope is that the issue will receive more political attention over coming years — as the amount it does at the moment is extremely scant.
Together, let’s hope that Israelis can work to reduce the high cost of living, encourage greater participation in the “high tech” workforce, reduce income inequality, and make Israel a more affordable place for all.
