Netanyahu focuses on Iran, neglects housing crisis
Benjamin Netanyahu has been prime minister since 2009 — enough time to set policy and determine priorities — but the state comptroller's recent report reveals that he has failed in addressing the housing crisis.
About two weeks after the social protests erupted in July 2011, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a special news conference to present a comprehensive plan to resolve the housing crisis. At the time, the protest movement was spreading throughout the country like wildfire in a field of thorns. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets, calling for “social justice.” Netanyahu felt, and rightly so, that he could lose control over the unfolding events.
At first, Netanyahu and other senior Likud Party officials tried to argue that left-wing anarchist groups were behind the protests, and that the protests were politically motivated. But these claims sounded increasingly out of touch as the protest movement grew, bringing almost all of the Israeli middle class, including Likud voters, out into the streets.
Once Netanyahu realized that the protests weren’t going to just go away, and that there was no sure indication as to when they would stop, he pulled out his plan to solve the housing crisis. Standing beside him on the occasion were Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz and Housing Minister Ariel Atias. The plan they presented included the removal of bureaucratic impediments to new construction, the construction of thousands of housing units for students, the additional construction of units to be rented at reduced prices and more. All these points were intended to placate the protesters who had taken to the streets.
But even this didn’t help. The demonstrations would not stop. So Netanyahu established the Committee for Socioeconomic Change, or the Trachtenberg Committee (as it was known colloquially). Its recommendations were controversial, and ultimately abandoned. The people demanding social justice went home.
