Labour parliamentarian Itzik Shmueli, a leader of the mass social protests of 2011, said: “The people who will be most affected by the spending cuts will naturally be those with low income. With these insufficient for a dignified manner of living already, further cuts will be disastrous.”
The cuts are expected to hit the Charedi community especially hard. However, the government is trying to steer the public discussions towards what opportunities investment in Charedi employment can bring.
On Sunday, the cabinet approved the creation of a panel to integrate Charedim into the workforce. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called this “the right step in the right direction”.
In its report, the Bank of Israel praised the deficit reduction programme in the 2013-2014 budget, saying that it “restored the credibility of the government’s commitment to the declining deficit path set in 2009, which is expected to reduce the debt to GDP ratio
to about 60 per cent by the end of the decade”.