How the Defense Ministry funds its overseas sprees

The Paris Air Show at Le Bourget is the showcase where we display our best technology, and where the best of our pilots and leaders like to hang out. And since it's a showcase, we don't put our flawed goods on display there - the stuff on which shekels were saved to cover the cost of Ehud Barak's luxury suite at the Paris Intercontinental Le Grande. Demagoguery, I hear you cry. But anyone familiar with all the people who fruitlessly bang their heads against the walls of the Defense Ministry's budget department cannot help being infuriated.

Take the case of Maria Aman, the Palestinian girl who, when she was three years and nine months old, lost most of her family to an Israel Defense Forces missile that also left her paralyzed and dependent on a respirator.

For three years, Hamdi Aman has been caring for his daughter in an Israeli hospital, and for three years, the Defense Ministry has been promising to provide him with money to rent an apartment nearby. But no money ever arrived.

Or take Miriam Adler, whose son has been suffering from a psychological illness since his army service, leaving him dependent on her care. But the Defense Ministry refuses to recognize his disability and has not provided any assistance at all.

Many disabled IDF veterans have to wage similar battles. They are begging for help. But when it comes to them, the ministry keeps its purse strings tightly closed.

This week, Meni Glass came in second in a wheelchair ballroom dancing contest. What began as a rehabilitation exercise has become one of the few joys in his life. In 1973, he sustained a back injury while serving in the paratroops, but he continued serving as a reservist, in both the Yom Kippur War later that year and the 1982 Lebanon War.

In 1984, he was wounded again during a combat medics course, and he decided to claim compensation from the Defense Ministry, which granted him a 20 percent disability rating. But over the years, he contracted cancer and his back injury worsened. So today he is confined to a wheelchair, and has been recognized by the National Insurance Institute as unable to work.

As such, he knew he was entitled to a special payment for needy disabled IDF veterans, of NIS 1,500 a month. He filed a claim at the Tiberias office of the ministry's rehab department, which sent him to a medical panel. He had all the necessary paperwork attesting to his permanent loss of ability to work, plus an additional medical opinion and a document from a hospice confirming that he used morphine and marijuana for medical purposes.

But the panel, which he says consisted of only one doctor, decided that he was capable of working. Accordingly, some of his privileges were withdrawn, and with them over NIS 5,000 a month that he had been receiving from the Defense Ministry.

"It's hard for me to look at Ehud's Barak's smile," he says today. "I haven't smiled for ages."

True, not everyone turned down by a medical panel is necessarily a victim of injustice. But it certainly isn't necessary for Defense Ministry bigwigs to sleep in luxury suites in Paris while the Air Show is on. They could easily pop over to Paris, say hello, and come back to look after all the people here who really need "a strong defense minister," in the words of Barak's campaign slogan.

The Defense Ministry's response: "The above invalid is recognized by the Defense Ministry as having a 50 percent disability as a result of his military service. In addition, he receives supplementary payments from the National Insurance Institute for disabilities that are not connected to his military service."

Good-bye asbestos

Last week, Haaretz carried a report about residents of the Shabal neighborhood in Pardes Hannah who have been living for years under roofs made of crumbling asbestos sheets, fully aware that they are endangering their health. Thirteen residents of the tiny neighborhood have contracted cancer, and many others have lung diseases. Repeated appeals to the government's Amidar housing company, which owns the buildings, had no effect.

Last week, after the report appeared in Haaretz and on a television program, a solution was apparently found, and a roofing contractor is slated to come to Pardes Hannah.

One call to Housing Minister Ariel Attias and it's good-bye asbestos. One hour after the call, Attias knew all the details; within a day, the ministry had found the almost NIS 1 million necessary to fix the roofs.

Next week, Attias promised, work will begin. It's easy to believe he really means it. He isn't doing it for us, it's for the good of the residents. A rare thing in these parts.