Struggling for every penny: It seems that the Israeli government has not yet internalized the magnitude of the incident that struck us on 7 October. Every day, more and more problems come to the headlines of evacuees, absorbing authorities and mayors who do not receive a budgetary response to deal with residents who have been outside their homes for a month.
The evacuees from Sderot at the Dead Sea // Yoni Rikner
On the northern border, a daily struggle is waged to evacuate the residents who are still in the line of fire. While the government has decided to evacuate communities up to 3 km from the border, communities that are only 100 and 200 meters further away are not included in the plan, despite the fact that in practice they are not spared gunfire and their homes have become a military camp for all intents and purposes.
Thus, on Tuesday, the mayor of Nahariya went to the Finance Committee, and only after shouting and demanding that the city be included in the state-funded evacuation plan did he receive a response. Yesterday, the chairman of the Confrontation Line Communities Committee and the head of the Mateh Asher Council, Moshe Davidovitch, did the same.
"People evacuated independently at their own expense and also lost sources of income," Davidovich says. "These are residents in 25 communities up to 5 kilometers from the northern border. Communities that suffer rockets, mortar shells and sirens every day. Settlements that have been turned into military camps. It's life-threatening."
Evacuees from Kibbutz Kfar Azza at a hotel in Shfayim, photo: Efrat Eshel
He has been trying for weeks to reach Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on the issue, he says, without success. "I told the president who visited us this week that the finance minister didn't answer, and he personally connected me to Smotrich, who told me: 'I don't object, but it's not in my court – the defense minister should define it as a security need.' They play ping pong with me, and it plays with human lives. These are people who fled their homes and cannot return to their communities, and all this economic burden, including the damage to their livelihood, is on them."
Davidovitch raises additional problems in the field of evacuating residents, which is conducted without orderly logic. "My residents are spread out in 38 sites from Sde Boker in the Negev through Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Nazareth, Ein Harod. In guest houses all over the country. 7,000 evacuees scattered like dust in a windstorm. This situation causes enormous organizational and budgetary difficulties. Apart from the small assistance we received from the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of the Negev, Galilee and National Resilience, all government ministries are sealed. We need educational psychological services, mental health care, social workers, educational assistance, aides for children in special education – all these solutions are not available. The Israeli government is paralyzed. The heads of the municipalities and councils know how to handle – let them give a budget and let us solve on our own."
Residents evacuated from Nir Yitzhak,
Davidovitch warned against delay in dealing with people's fate before a forum of directors general of government ministries that went up to Kiryat Shmona last week. "I told them, by the time you move, the war will be over and people will lose it. There is no management here. The state has entered the market, and most ministers are not waking up from it."
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