Minister Meir Sheetrit: "I worked the students really hard, but I also worked myself hard... And if there was a kid who disturbed the class I would tell him to come to me and slap him as hard as I could." Photo by Uriel Sinai
His tough life as a Moroccan immigrant shaped Meir Sheetrit's view of the world. Now he's out to implement his basic rule: Spare the rod and spoil the child.
He speaks fast, thinks fast; he's frenetic. He uses a lot of current Hebrew slang, like "I take no account of anyone." And he really doesn't. Of anyone. He's totally fearless. Asked about his Israeliness, he says that what he loves in Israel is the bluntness, the chutzpah, the improvising. The ability to be small but think gigantic. To be all that tiny but behave big-time. Those are his traits, too, he laughs. From that point of view, I am a true Israeli. Very Israeli. In France or America I would be lost.
He arrived in Israel from Morocco at the age of 10 with his parents and eight brothers and sisters. He still remembers the canvas of the truck that took them from the port of Haifa to the transit camp of tin shacks at Netivot, in the Negev, in January 1957. He still remembers how they declined to get off, thinking that Netivot was a cemetery. He remembers how the truck driver tricked them and made them get off and then dumped all their belongings on the hard ground. And the astonishment at discovering that Israel was not a land of milk and honey. His parents' shock. The disaster all around.
But he adjusted, worked hard and had a determination to learn. From age zero, he had a will to learn. He completed high school at the age of 15 (financing all his studies by working in an orchard) and by 19 had a first degree, the second resident of the town of Yavneh to attend university. He studied microbiology and biochemistry.
At the age of 26, he was head of the Yavneh local council. By 30, he was already the great revolutionary of Yavneh. At 34, he was a member of the Knesset. But the fast track to the summit by "the most promising of the development town mayors" was later suspended more than once. Once when he moved off-track to spend a few years in the Jewish Agency; again when he moved heaven and earth to stop the cancer that spread in the body of his beloved 12-year-old daughter Miri; and most recently when Sharon blocked his advance, because of his support for Benjamin Netanyahu.
So at the moment he is a minister without portfolio. After the Finance Ministry and the Justice Ministry, and after the great expectations, he is a minister without portfolio in the Finance Ministry. But Meir Sheetrit is not giving up. He's not the type. He is doing his work at the end of the line so that he can get back to the front of the line. He doesn't think there is a force on earth that can stop him. He doesn't believe there is a better candidate in the country. He is taking advantage of his one-time opportunity to reestablish his status as a central player in Israeli politics, as a legitimate pretender to the crown.
He's a riveting personality. Overflowing with microeconomic data and with macroeconomic analyses and displaying an insider's knowledge of the Israeli power systems. Yet at the same time he is different, completely different. He is a true lover of mankind who espouses rigid social views. He is a true hater of injustice who is very close to big capital. He is assaulting the welfare allowances of the elderly and the disabled while fighting the battle of individuals against the establishment. He is ready to be cruel to ordinary workers in order to save them. To save them according to his lights, that is. After all, he's from there. He knows. Because he comes from there, he knows how you get out of there.
There is a pleasant feeling of restrained abundance in the living room of his home in Yavneh. The sounds of Bach that wash softly over the room are the choice of his wife, Ruth (a PR person for the Contractors Association) and his son, David (a jazz pianist). He himself prefers Israeli or Andalusian music. He's searching for the tight integration between the Maghreb and the West. Between the traditional family and the modern world. He believes that the culture he brought with him from Ksar al-Souk will find its place in the emerging Israeli way of life. He believes that a 10-year-old boy who came from Ksar al-Souk will one day be prime minister and will foment a great revolution here.
In the past you made two attempts to become prime minister. Do you still aspire to become prime minister of Israel?
"Certainly. I also believe I will be prime minister. On the day I reach the conclusion that there is no chance of that, I will leave politics - that very day."
When you look at Ariel Sharon or Netanyahu or Amram Mitzna, don't you feel a certain sense of inferiority?
"On the contrary. On the contrary. I think I can fulfill the post of prime minister very well indeed. I don't want to brag, but after I am prime minister for four or eight years, this will be a completely different country. There will be a revolution here. What I did in Yavneh in the 1970s and 1980s, I will do in the whole country. I believe it's possible. I believe if the right decisions are made, and if the courage exists to implement them, it will be possible to foment a revolution here."
And what will the heart of that revolution be? Will it be a Thatcherite revolution? A free market revolution?
"Look, I don't think I am a Thatcherite. I am the third way. The people I admire most are [Tony] Blair, [Bill] Clinton and above all [John] Kennedy. What I believe in is a combination of the free market and social sensitivity. But the heart of the revolution will be the idea of restoring personal responsibility. There will be an end to the mess that exists today in the country, which I find intolerable, and a return to personal accountability."
Explain to me what you are talking about.
"All along I have been preoccupied with what happened to Middle Eastern Jewry in Israel, especially to the community of which I am a part, the Moroccan community. We have an absurd situation that cries out to heaven. In Morocco, which is an undemocratic, totalitarian state, where to this day there is no organization of social welfare, the Jews made an honorable living. There were many poor Jews, yes, but they made an honorable living. There were no Jewish criminals. There were no Jews in drugs, prostitution or crime. Everyone worked at whatever he was capable of. Then the Moroccan immigrants arrived in Israel and were absorbed with much good will and with the bear hug of the state, which tried to westernize and civilize them.
"But after one generation you find the offspring of those immigrants populating most of the disadvantaged levels of society. They constitute the majority of the criminal inmates in the prisons, and very many of the criminals and offenders who are drug addicts; the unemployed, the unable, those who do not make an honorable living. I asked myself how this disaster occurred. Why it was that this community collapsed precisely in a democratic, enlightened, supportive state. Why did it happen? The answer I arrived at is that in the process of absorption, the Sephardim, in general, and the Moroccans, in particular, lost the most precious asset they brought to Israel: personal responsibility."
I still don't understand what you are driving at.
"The society in Morocco was extremely patriarchal. The father was the master in the home, the king of his castle. He was viewed with the greatest reverence. But that reverence, which was the center of the entire social order, was based on the fact that the father was the provider. And every father knew that if he didn't educate his children, they would not be educated. If he didn't see to his home, his children would end up on the street. If he didn't bring food home, his children would go hungry. So there was no choice. Everyone did what he could to provide for his family in the best way he could. Some brought home meat every day and others brought only vegetables to make soup. But it didn't matter what he brought, because the father was the master of the house. He was the head of the family. What he said, went.
"Do you think I would have dared to raise my voice to my father the way my son can talk to me? Not on your life. There was a distance vis-?-vis the father. There was discipline. Whenever he was called to the Torah, we stood up. Whenever we said `Shabbat shalom,' we kissed the palm of his hand. The father of the family decided everything. He decided what was right. He was the linchpin of the social order.
"But what happened when we came to Israel? The State of Israel said to the father that if you can't work we will give you welfare. If you don't have an apartment, we will give you Amidar [public housing]. If your family is having a hard time, we will send you a social worker. And that was a mistake. A terrible mistake. It made people lose the feeling that they were responsible for their fate. The result was that the father figure was broken. The community fell apart. In my family, fortunately, reverence for the father remained intact, but in many other families the father stopped working, grew lazy and finally broke. And then the children thought they were smarter than him.
"Families disintegrated. Families turned to relief. And when families became dependent on relief, the father was blamed: because he didn't provide and because he wasn't obeyed at home. The whole moral structure that held us together in Morocco collapsed. That is the disaster that befell us."
Is that the source of your anger at the welfare state? Is it because you see it as a kind of failed substitute father?
"Of course. Of course. The welfare state simply broke the father figure. Its paternalism was bad because it completely failed to replace the family cell and the sense of personal responsibility people had for their fate. That is what immersed people in poverty. That is what made them dependent on welfare allowances. It was a disaster.
"Look, there are Mizrahim [Jews of Middle Eastern descent] who say that there was discrimination by Ashkenazim against Sephardim here. I don't accept that. I don't think there was ever discrimination. The claim that there was some sort of conspiracy to screw the Mizrahim is ridiculous. But people were deprived - unintentionally, and because of a lack of understanding. At bottom, that stemmed from Ben-Gurion's terrible mistake in thinking that it was possible to educate the children without educating the parents, that it was possible to overleap this `generation of the desert.'"
Did your father break, too? Did your family fall apart?
"No. Because my father never agreed to accept welfare. Never. He swore on his life that he would not go to the Welfare Bureau. He saw it as a humiliation, as begging for alms. He worked hard his whole life. He worked in tree planting, road building, in construction. In whatever there was. He did hard labor. From six in the morning until sundown. But he saw work as honor. And he maintained his self-respect. So, even if life was very hard, it was a good life. It was a life with honor and a life with much love. My father didn't break, so our family didn't break."
Was that your formative experience? Is that why you are so opposed to transfer payments, allowances and the welfare state in general?
"It's not a matter of a personal experience. When we came to the treasury now and discovered the catastrophic crisis we are facing, I tried to examine what was happening here - what had happened here in the course of years. What I discovered is that until 1973, Israel was a relatively egalitarian state, with a good education system and an average annual growth rate of about 5 percent. But in the past 30 years the gaps have grown, poverty has intensified and growth has shrunk.
"When I tried to understand what the difference is between the first 15 years of the state, the good years, and the next 30 years, I reached the conclusion that there is one difference: in the first years there were very few people who didn't work. The majority of the country worked. Only minimal amounts were allocated for allowances. Today, in contrast, out of a budget of NIS 265 billion, NIS 39 billion goes for debt repayments and NIS 70 billion for transfer payments [such as child allowances and so forth]; NIS 43 billion goes for direct allowances, such as relief, old age, disability and guaranteed income. That is absurd. It's an untenable situation. Therefore, it is clear to me that we have to go back to the value of Jewish work. We have to go back to a situation in which people work. Effectively, what our economic plan is designed to do is to restore Israel from a culture of charity payments to a culture of work."
What do you say to the contention that you are no more than Netanyahu's Mizrahi fig leaf, that you are the development town boy who is serving the interests of the rich?
"I am no one's fig leaf. I simply think a fatal disease has been created here that has to be dealt with. I am the last person who would be against the truly weak. Because I come from there. I never forget that I am from there. But in my view, those who let people live from welfare allowances are burying them. They are bring about a situation in which these people will be poor their whole life and their children after them will also be poor. In the past decade, the transfer payments increased by 280 percent, but the scale of poverty only grew. The number of people receiving guaranteed income rose from 15,000 to 150,000. The gaps within the society only increased. That means the system isn't working. We need a new system. We have to get people back to work."
Still, there a lot of people who say, "You are from Yavneh, you are a Moroccan, you are a hero of the development towns, so how can be you so cruel? How can you adopt the approach of Milton Friedman?"
"It's exactly because of my background that I find it comfortable to speak out. I take account of no one. So I can say things to the public that Bibi [Netanyahu] will never dare say. Because when we came to this country we started from scratch. We had a little money in Morocco, but we lost it all on the way, and we started from scratch here.
"I remember well my father, my mother and myself going with friends of mine to pick cotton in the summer from six in the morning until six in the evening. I still remember the feeling of the thorns on my hands. And I remember what I felt when I wanted to enter high school but my parents couldn't afford to send me, and I went to work at the age of 12. I got up at six every morning and came home from school at four and then I would work in the orchard until eight and do homework until midnight. It was very hard. And a lot of times I asked myself, Why me, of all people? Why did things have to be so hard for me? But I decided that nothing would break me. I decided that I would show them all. I would beat them all. I didn't whine and I didn't become bitter: I told myself that I would realize my potential. I would not bend in the face of the difficulty.
"So today I can come to everyone and tell them that if they sweat, they will succeed. Because I say that a person's fate is in his hands. I don't accept this business that your fate is decreed in advance like a caste in India. That if you are born poor, you will stay poor. There is no such thing. I say: `Do you want to succeed? Then sweat. Work hard. You are responsible for yourself.'"
So you believe that those who spare the rod spoil the child?
"I am not in favor of blows. But as a metaphor I accept that concept completely. I think that what sometimes seems to be cruelty is the real love, the true concern. And I think that anyone who thinks he is doing people a favor by embracing them in a bear hug and taking away their personal responsibility is actually burying them."
Would you agree that you are an Israeli-Mizrahi version of American conservatism? Like the American conservatives, you believe in a combination of personal effort, a free market and family values: order, discipline, responsibility.
"Look, I'm not from MIT, or from [the University of] Chicago, either. But in the French school in Morocco that I attended there was order. There was discipline. And I owe a lot to the order and the discipline I learned there.
"I still remember how whenever a student did something wrong, the teacher would make him stand in front of the class with his hand held out and would hit him on the fingers 13 times. The student was allowed to cry but not to move his hand. If he moved his hand, the count began again. That created distance. It produced discipline. So we all learned as we were supposed to. We were all clean and orderly and educated. We treated the teacher like God."
You're not critical of those methods, are you? You have a high regard for them.
"I don't think we have to put those methods into practice today. But we can learn from them. The system generated discipline. When you see the chaotic character of the education system today, when you see that there is no discipline and the teacher is wretched and helpless in the face of the children, you begin to wonder what is right. I don't think we have to use physical means, but I do think we have to educate. We have to rehabilitate the teacher's authority. I remember that when I was a teacher, at the age of 19, I worked the students really hard, but I also worked myself hard. I gave them hundreds of exercises to do but I invested a great deal in them. And if there was a kid who disturbed the class I would tell him to come to me and slap him as hard as I could - he went into shock and there wasn't another peep from the class. That was no big deal at the time; the whole thing of children's rights hadn't yet developed, and you didn't have this law or that law, or what the psychologists would say."
So you don't like those developments?
"I think they are exaggerated. When you visit a school in England, you see discipline. When I visited schools in Argentina, all the students stood up when I entered the room. And quietly. They all wore neat uniforms. Whereas here there is anarchy that I don't think contributes to education. And in this anarchy it's the weak students who fall by the wayside. There aren't enough achievements in this anarchy. It's not by chance that in the 1960s, Israel was first in the world in achievements in mathematics, whereas today we are in 39th place.
"Overall, the education system is in a serious state today: the achievements are not good enough. Sixty percent of the students don't obtain a high-school matriculation certificate. Of each shekel in the education budget, only half a shekel goes in practice toward the student's education. A quarter of the budget goes toward management. So there is something crying out to heaven here. Something that needs to be thoroughly corrected."
In 2001, you were slated to become education minister, but the Shas party blocked the appointment. Do you regret that?
"Certainly. I believe education is the be-all and end-all. My dream is to transfer NIS 10 billion from the various budgets to education. Then, I believe we will foment a complete revolution here. Within a generation we will create a different society.
"But the Shas people knew what they were doing. They knew that if I became education minister, they would be erased. Because if I am education minister, there will truly be a long school day. The money that is wasted on management and consultation will be shifted to education. And every teacher will have to know what is going on with every child. Every teacher will have to know whether the student has a hole in his sock.
"And when there is an education system that sees to the needs of the students from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon, who will go to the Shas schools? When there is an education system that provides meals and books and extracurricular activities and computers, who will want Shas? You know, I go to the Moroccan mother in Dimona and ask her, `Do you want your son to be another Meir Sheetrit or do you want him to be some kind of Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] who will go to a yeshiva?'"
Is it fair to say that you found the rise of Shas in the 1990s painful, because Shas [Sephardi Torah Guardians, a party founded by Haredi Moroccans] represents the exact opposite of what you stand for?
"Look, I am a believing person. I am from a family of rabbis. I am a cantor in the synagogue, and the tradition of Moroccan Jewry is part of me. But I see no contradiction between all that and modernization and westernization. When Shas was established, my dream was that one day all the Sephardi rabbis would meet and remove all their black garments and put on normal clothes - as in Morocco. My dream was that they really would restore the former glory, as they promised. That they would go back to the old Sephardi religion, which was moderate and never forced anything on anyone, which made religion beloved. Unfortunately, that did not happen. Unfortunately, Shas became the competitor of the most extreme form of Ashkenazi Judaism."
Don't you think that the economic plan that you and Netanyahu are espousing is extreme, that it lacks compassion?
"It is a harsh plan. It will hurt a lot of people. But if you take an in-depth, long-term approach, it is compassionate. It will get people out of the poverty cycle. It is the start of a lengthy move that is intended to make it clear to people that they must first of all help themselves. I think there is less compassion in an approach that buries people in poverty by giving them allowances and telling them, don't make an effort, stay at home. I think that if someone has a flat tire, he has to be helped to fix the tire and get back on the road, and not to put the car on a semi-trailer and suffocate him with cotton batting."
Isn't it the case that you are hurting the elderly, the disabled, the single mothers, yet at the same time you are dividing NIS 2.5 billion among the rich in the form of tax reductions?
"The aim of the plan is to reduce the allowances and create incentives for working. The problem is that in Israel, 13 percent of the population pays 90 percent of the income tax. So it's clear that when you reduce tax, they will be the main beneficiaries in the first stage. But who are those 13 percent? They are the people who supply places of employment. It's from their money that allowances are paid. So do we want to kill them? Why do people here want to kill the rich? Why do people want to make them leave the country? It's absurd."
It's said against you that you are too close to the business community, that you identify with it completely, and that there is a connection between that and the fact that you didn't impose tax on capital or on inheritances, that you hurt only the weak.
"Money makes no impression on me. Nor do business people. It's true that I have connections to business people because I received donations from people who believe in me, and that creates a connection. There is no other choice. But I have always been careful not to accept a donation that I will not be able to return, so as not to be dependent on anyone. So that I will always be able to tell them `no.' And in the end, I am a person who takes no account, who takes no account of anyone.
"More specifically, I think an inheritance tax is wrong. In the end, the rich don't really pay it. On the other hand, I support a 25-percent capital gains tax. I think it is inconceivable to tax work and not to tax capital. At the same time, I don't understand the assault on the rich. It makes me angry that people hold grudges against those who are successful. Sometimes people say to me that I came from poverty, but when I made good I changed direction and moved over to the other side of the street.
"Whereas I say, on the contrary: I am very proud of the fact that I succeeded, that I left the cycle of poverty. My children will not be poor, I am set for life, and thank God, I lack for nothing. So what's wrong with that. It proves that it can be done. I want others to look at me and succeed just as I did. Why not?"
Do you have no compunctions about any elements of the economic plan?
"The plan is the right move to make. But I think it could have been done with less agony and anger. It could have been done on a gradual basis. I proposed that we not initiate legislation on wages and pensions, but that we conduct negotiations with [Histadrut labor federation chair] Amir Peretz. I believed we could come to an agreement with him. But my opinion was not accepted. I was in a minority in the treasury."
Are you saying that, while the plan is right, the way it was advanced is wrong, that you find Netanyahu's tendency to confrontation exaggerated?
"Netanyahu is the finance minister and I respect his opinion. But in my view a mistake was made here. The confrontationism is totally unnecessary. There was no need to go to legislation right now. In my conversations with Amir Peretz we made quite good progress, and I think we could have reached a positive agreement."
Is it true, as some say, that you don't like Netanyahu's attempt to humiliate Peretz, that you don't like the politics of humiliation?
"That's correct. Amir Peretz is my friend. I don't think there is any reason to humiliate him. I also don't think the Histadrut should humiliate Bibi. So I tried to arrive at solutions of understanding that in my opinion are feasible. I know what humiliation is, and therefore I try not to humiliate anyone. It's unnecessary, completely unnecessary. The whole current confrontation is superfluous.
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