Call for government: Stop the move to increase pensions among IDF permanent servicemen, who are due to be approved today at a cabinet meeting.
"In any case, salary and pension expenses account for more than 50% of the defense budget," write attorneys Meir Rubin and Ariel Ehrlich, director and head of the legitimacy department at the conservative research institute Ecclesiastical Forum, in their appeal to the government.
In their request, they noted that "increasing pension and salary expenses necessarily comes at the expense of the IDF's intensifying components in the face of its challenges."
"Warriors' Discrimination"
The increase in pensions for permanent employees has provoked public opposition over the years, due to their level.
In the same application of the forum, for example, it is stated that the proposed plan includes acute discrimination of fighters, compared to reservists.
According to the Ministry of Finance, IDF retirees receive exceptional pension benefits: the average retirement age in the IDF is 46, compared with 54 among police officers and 59 among other security bodies.
The average pension of IDF retirees is about NIS 17.2 thousand a month - higher than that of the police and similar to that of other security bodies. This is while the average monthly benefit of other civil servants, who retire in their 60s, is less than - 8,000 shekels.
The analysis conducted by Dr. Michael Sarel, former chief economist at the Ministry of Finance and head of the Ecclesiastical Economy Forum, states that "on average, and by weighting the total number of working months, an IDF retiree receives a pension pension 9.2 times greater than that of a civil servant."
In the case of "second generation", this is an even larger gap - 15 times.
According to senior members of the Ecclesiastical Forum, "the enlargements that are now being sought to be retroactively trained and fixed for the future were made illegally, in the IDF only (and not in any of the other security bodies), just so that the IDF can do so unhindered."
"A huge burden on the budget"
These define the burden of pension increases on the state budget as "enormous, with the cost of illegal pension increases already standing at about NIS 1.1 billion a year. According to the proposal, they will increase to NIS 1.5 billion a year." ".
