Israel’s Ties to Nonprofit Groups and Services Run Deep

By HAIM WATZMAN

It’s no surprise that Israel’s nonprofit groups are a major force. The country began as a nonprofit conglomerate that turned into a state.

Israeli nonprofit groups employ 9.2 percent of the labor force, ranking it fourth

among Western nations, even higher than the United States, according to figures compiled by Benjamin Gidron and his staff at the Israeli Center for Third Sector Research.

Mr. Gidron notes that charities and mutual-aid organizations are a part of Jewish religious and social tradition.

Jews from around the world contributed to support the small Jewish population that lived in Palestine before the advent of the Zionist movement.

When political Zionism began motivating Jews to immigrate to Palestine and to work to establish a Jewish state there, the new pioneers also needed the support of their compatriots abroad, and overseas philanthropy played a key role in the establishment of neighborhoods, settlements, and economic enterprises.

The Zionist community in Palestine also established its own institutions.

Most of those were founded and run by ideological organizations that functioned as political parties as well as cradle-to-grave providers of a wide range of services such as education, medical care, youth activities, and old-age homes.

The largest and most influential of these organizations was the Histadrut labor federation, which was in turn dominated by the political faction that later became Israel’s Labor Party.

When Israel won its independence in 1948, its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, worked to nationalize many of those party institutions, especially those that were run by parties other than Labor.

Even so, important public services, including health care, many secondary schools, and most post-secondary education, remained at least nominally independent of the government.

Loosening Connection

As Labor began to lose its unchallenged position of leadership in the 1970’s, leading to its loss of political power in 1977, the tight link between the government and nonprofit organizations began to loosen. Furthermore, the inflation-fighting fiscal austerity imposed by both Labor and Likud governments in the 1980’s led the government to withdraw from providing many public services, with the slack being taken up by nonprofit organizations.

Still, the government remains very much involved.

Many nonprofit social-service groups are largely contractors for the government.

National and local governments provided 64 percent of the money spent by nonprofit groups in Israel in 1995, the most recent year for which budget figures are available, with only 10 percent coming from charitable donations and fees for services making up the rest.