The Israeli government was sufficiently foolish—or more probably, corrupt—to issue unrestricted concessions to private drilling companies. Free-market policies might be good for large countries with plenty of gas reserves, where many competing companies will assuredly supply national needs for centuries to come; but in Israel, Noble Energy has become a gas monopoly.

This private company will export the gas reserves of the Land of Israel, the field will be emptied in about a decade, and Jews will be left without gas again.

Jews discovered gas fields in Sinai—and gave Sinai away to Egypt; we discovered gas fields near Gaza—and passed the offshore reserves to Arafat; discovered gas fields near Haifa—and conceded them to a foreign company. God gave us good land with sufficient reserves, but we Jews have squandered them.

The new construction law will not cut down the red tape, but just streamline the approvals. Instead, a proper solution would be to allow anyone to build anything on his land plot as long as the construction is insured and supervised by a licensed architect .

The visiting secretary-general of the OECD brought us three demands.
Israel must fight corruption in her defense industry—in other words, it must stop paying bribes to third-world officials in charge of military procurement. That would leave Israel with no export markets, as bribes are part of the business there.

Israel must strengthen protection of intellectual property—in other words, extend protection for expired foreign drug patents. That would cause Israel’s Teva, the largest manufacturer of generic drugs, to incur major losses.

And finally, Israel must stop using data from Judea and Samaria in her statistical reports to OECD. Thus, Israel has to formally relinquish the settlement blocs.

Worse, the Chairman of IAI’s Board of Directors announced during the opening ceremony that his company plans to transfer all its production to the United States, except the minimum required for Israeli defense needs.

The OECD also suggested that Israel cut down on military expenses. We believe that the defense budget is inflated and can be be reduced significantly by relying on Israel’s nuclear weapons.

This way, Jewish consumers will foot the bill for the kibbutzim and the Arabs. While kibbutzim receive highly subsidized water, Arabs steal it for free.

The price increase won’t significantly decrease water consumption because both Israeli consumers and kibbutzim use water with extreme efficiency.

In fact, it is normal for developed economies to run trade deficits because they attract foreign investment. Israel’s October surplus, a meager $45 million, was made possible by the collapse of her imports, which contracted by 25% compared to last year.

The Bank’s policy of keeping the dollar-to-shekel rate artificially high means that consumers overpay 20-30% for the imported goods.

In October, the BoI purchased another $1.5 billion. If the intervention propped the dollar by 20%, this month Bank of Israel cost taxpayers 1.1 billion shekels, an amount equal to the country’s defense expenditures.

God gave us an excellent land with oil in Sinai, uranium in Jordan, and natural gas in Gaza.

The cost of desalinated water would thus double, greatly exceeding the price of water supplied to kibbutzim and to our Arab enemies. Common Jews who buy water at inflated rates will subsidize the agricultural lobby and terrorists.

On the Israeli side, the project is being lobbied for by Shimon Peres, whose fund will handle the financing.

The mega-project spells an ecological catastrophe for the Dead Sea. Red Sea waters, rich with fauna, will turn dead when entering the salty Dead Sea, and contaminate its basin.

Global warming is related to human activities, but in any case there is nothing inherently bad about the weather becoming a bit warmer.

Any cut in Israeli emissions would come at a great cost to the economy, as factories will move into Palestinian-occupied territories. It is absurd to reduce emissions in Israel while the Arabs twenty miles away blacken the sky.

In the midterm, the BoI’s efforts are doomed as international hedge funds possess vastly larger resources.

As we predicted, the BoI’s reckless policy of supporting the dollar can easily cost Israeli taxpayers in the range of 50 billion shekels, far in excess of export revenues the bank’s policy generated.

The indictment accuses Jewish farmers of exploiting Thai laborers as slaves. It remains to be explained though, how the Thais worked allegedly for 20 hours a day every day. The indictment also charges Jews with endangering the Thais’ lives with agricultural chemicals, despite the fact that their Kfar Maimon farm grows pesticide-free vegetables. The Thais were paid slightly below the minimum wage, but were provided with food and housing.

The indictment states that the biggest threat the Jews used against their “slaves” was termination of their jobs. If the “slavery” was so unbearable, why did the Thais not simply leave and return to their homeland?

Leftists demand resort-like working conditions even for illegal African immigrants.

At the same time, promoting Avodah Ivrit—Jewish-made goods—remains a punishable offense of racist incitement.

Most of the new mortgages are tied to the BoI’s rate. As soon as the rate is inevitably increased, thousands of families will find mortgage payments to be beyond their means.

The Bank’s reckless policy leaves Israel with whopping $52 billion of reserves. In a very short while, when the dollar falls against the shekel by no less than 10%, Israeli taxpayers will lose about 18 billion shekels through the devaluation of their dollar reserves.

That’s in a country which could not find 400 million shekels to reinforce Sderot against rocket attacks…

The government continues paying unemployment and other benefits to Israeli Arabs, discouraging them from agricultural work.

“Human rights” groups continue subsidizing 20,000 black illegals so that they don’t need to take agricultural jobs.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews remain jobless, despite the fact that the Torah envisages an agricultural society, and Jews not engaged in agriculture cannot observe many commandments.

Instead, Israel can follow Iran’s example: sign the NPT, contract Russia to build a cheap reactor, and then refuse to allow the IAEA to conduct inspections of her military facilities.

Israel need not spend billions on technology we have already mastered. We can build the reactor ourselves without signing the NPT and rest assured that there will be no significant sanctions.

The profits are largely attributable to the Bank of Israel’s intervention, which keeps the dollar artificially high, and consequently makes overseas income balloon.

The BOI creates a major bubble with interventions in the foreign exchange market and by keeping the interest rate at near-zero. While BOI’s policy cannot increase industrial investment, it props speculation and the real-estate boom, only to make the eventual restructuring more severe.

In truth, the immigration police aim at expelling just 20,000 illegals this year, out of allegedly 280,000. So far this year, less than a thousand have been deported.

The number of 280,000 is telling. The Knesset is only considering expulsion for those who entered Israel on tourist and five-year work visas. About 200,000 Palestinians who work in Israel illegally are not even being considered for deportation. Unlike the harmless Thais and Filipinos, they are protected by the peacenik lobby.

Now the Arabs, who enjoy extensive Saudi financing, can switch from buying properties to buying land. Arabs commonly pay well above the market value of properties, and there is no shortage of unscrupulous Jews willing to sell them the land.

The government has misrepresented the issue as economic, but it is nationalist and religious.

The Arabs—as usual—will not pay a penny, and the government won’t risk riots by disconnecting the delinquents.

For decades, that law served Israel well in taking the land of Arab villages. In recent years, the law has increasingly been applied against Jews whose land was expropriated for infrastructural projects. In response to the outcry, the government decided to compensate in full.

The Bank of Israel’s attempts to pump liquidity into the markets did not prevent the credit crunch. Banks don’t lend because they are afraid of economic risks, rather than because they lack resources.

The reserves leave Israel vulnerable to staggering losses. A drop in the shekel-to-dollar rate to 3.2–3.4 would cost the treasury about 40 billion shekels as the dollar reserves become less valuable.

The Bank of Israel’s policy of buying up dollars is good for exporters, but they cannot export anyway because of the foreign-market situation. At the same time, it increases the cost of imports and suffocates the domestic market.

Sale of the Holy Land grossly violates the Torah, which only allows it to be leased, and for no more than fifty years. Israel is so small that normal free-market expedience of private land ownership must give way to national feasibility: land sales could plausibly create a situation in which the Jewish nation as a whole owns next to no land in Central Israel.

The biggest problem with land sales is that they make the land available to Arabs. For twenty years, Saudis have pumped money into Israel Arab foundations to buy real estate in sensitive areas. Now Saudi money would buy land plots in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Yaffo to make them de facto non-Jewish land.

During crises, normal countries close their borders to foreign trade to save jobs locally, but Israel aids the Palestinian enemy.

The amendment will drive up mortgage interest rates, especially for poor customers.

Still, the budget deficit runs at 3 percent, twice the amount approved by the Bank of Israel.

Meanwhile, Israel invests in Palestine to create jobs there.

What is good in liberal economies, is bad in a Jewish state: Arabs would privatize the land under  their hundreds of thousands of illegal houses.

Due to the economic crisis, the budgetary income is likely to be smaller than expected, and the expenditures will greater than expected. Despite the crisis, the government has increased its expenditures and refused to cut the bloated ministries and other pork-barrel spending.

The usual culprits—Shas, UTJ, and Histadrut—are decrying the budget as not sufficiently sensitive to their predatory needs.

Tax cuts will not start for another two years, though the overtaxed economy urgently needs them now, or we risk cutting government expenses.

$3 billion in guarantees are offered for business loans. Months ago Netanyahu lashed out at Olmert for aiding his friends’ businesses. Now we’re to believe that Bibi’s government would disburse guarantees based on some honest criteria.

Massive water supply to agricultural kibbutzim continues unabated at subsidized prices. Jordan and the Palestinians receive more than twice their water quotas from Israel.

Previously a state company, Chemikalim, was sold to the Ofer family for $330 million (a 53 percent controlling stake).

The Ofer brothers reinvest their proceeds from predatory use of Israeli natural resources abroad: they have dozens of real estate projects from Eastern Europe to the United States.

Israel’s twenty richest families control more than 60 percent of GDP and 80 percent of market capitalization.

The deregulation is especially odd in light of the Israeli banks’ gross mismanagement of private stock accounts: hundreds of thousands of Israelis saw their bank-managed portfolios wiped out. The mega-losses posted by almost all Israeli banks also don’t lend them credibility.

Though Arab residents weigh negatively on Israeli performance, the main culprit is the post-socialist Israeli bureaucracy, which suffocates business development.

The plan also calls for government loan guarantees for the companies with the largest losses. Instead of simply allowing the bubbles to break down, the government will support the most speculative projects, from high-end real estate to failed high-tech ventures.

The support is already available to the banks: they racked up heavy profits from speculative portfolio investments and loans, and now are practically exempted from losses as the Bank of Israel provided them with long-term, virtually interest-free loans. Taxpayers are indirectly covering the banks’ losses through inflation.

Netanyahu cannot implement any real changes in the economy because his coalition deal with Barak gave the predatory trade unions veto power.

Crazy Jews supply the Palestinians 2½ times the agreed-upon water quota, despite the severe drought.

The BOI’s head has revealed his anti-crisis program:

- massive government investments in infrastructure, primarily railroads (a failed Keynesian solution of the Great Depression era. Why squander the state’s resources for something that private investors deem unfeasible?)
- improving education (very good, but the better-educated pupils would not join the economy until a decade from now, and thus cannot solve the current crisis)
- increase the term of unemployment benefits (turn taxpayers into spongers).

Israel cannot borrow huge amounts like America does, the dollar being a reserve currency. Stanley Fischer thus earmarked mere $1.2 billion for investment programs, which is ridiculously insufficient.

The solution to Israeli unemployment is, in fact, simple:

- expel the 1.5 million illegal migrants who take local jobs.
- ban Palestinian workers completely.
- restrict unemployment benefits to two months so that people will take any jobs.
- remove the minimum wage limit to allow Jews to compete with Arabs in low-wage sectors where Arabs are hired illegally.
- ban Histadrut trade unions and dismantle the red-tape bureaucracy.