MK Bezalel Smutrich delivered a speech last week from the Knesset podium, which for the first time in my life I felt he was speaking from my throat. I am a left-wing, feminist, lesbian woman - Smutrich and I am not really "friends", to say the least. And sway in his character, and I of course absorbed and shaped my opinion of him from this medium.
He spoke of the students' wives who began in protest of the new government's reckless and cruel move to end their subsidy for daycare payments.
These are women who work, are active and support entire families while their spouses study Torah, and are now suffering a blow from the arm of a despicable government, which seems to have decided to take revenge on that sector.
MK Bezalel Smutrich,
About 85,000 families who are entitled to a subsidy for day care under state supervision have not received the subsidy since the beginning of the 2002 school year. I am one of them, I have an eight-month-old baby, and instead of paying about NIS 1,000 a month, I currently pay NIS 3,000.
Many rumors circulated about the reason for the move, and in his speech Smutrich clarified the real reason why women and families from all walks of Israeli society, who are entitled to a state subsidy the exorbitant payment of NIS 3,000 a month for the opportunity to go to work, do not accept it.
It turns out that the Ministry of Economy, headed by Orna Barbibai, was in such a hurry to carry out the decree that God forbid not one child in the ultra-Orthodox society would remain, and due to the software's lack of preparation with the new formula, they closed the possibility of all Israeli citizens applying for subsidies.
Everyone pays full price - no matter what the socio-economic need of tens of thousands of people who need subsidies to go to work.
One of the mothers in my son's home, a single mother from Ethiopia, took her baby out of kindergarten after a month because she could not bear the heavy financial burden.
Along with her, there are quite a few other women who are unable to bear the burden, and are inevitably excluded from the labor market.
NIS 3,000 a month, if you did not know, is more than half the minimum wage.
Finance Minister Lieberman justifies the change in the law by saying that the subsidy "does not encourage work."
Preventing low-income women like us from entering the labor market because the state is sure we have reserves in the bank is this an incentive?
Throughout my adult years I voted for left-wing parties, I believed that ideologically I was more connected to their path and I thought that the day would come and they would do better with me.
I thought it was the thought of society that motivated them and not the economy, I did not think that what would really motivate them would be years in the opposition where they accumulated ultra-Orthodox hatred, poor and weakened, and it seems that since the last government was formed - revenge has played a major role.
No change, no new line.
Disconnection from us, and disgust towards those who are perceived in their eyes as a Bibist, a believer, a Jew.
I have never felt the way I feel now the government is cruelly biting into my pocket, taking me down to dust and degrading me financially, like the current government.
Members of the Knesset and the feminist ministry, the "left" government, will wake up on your own.
The author is the editor of the website "Politically Calls"