As Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara strives to deprive the families of draft-evading haredi men of all possible discounts and subsidies, the daycare subsidy has stood out as one of the most critical - and controversial.
Currently, daycare subsidies are offered to parents who meet one of the existing and long-standing criteria: employed, studying at a higher education institution, new immigrants, returning citizens, in active regular service, receiving unemployment payments, performing National Service, or receiving disability or income-assistance payments.
Daycare subsidies began in the State of Israel's early days, as a way to encourage women to join the workforce, and to this day, that is the stated goal of the daycare subsidies. In the 1980s and 1990s, there began to be a shift in mindset, as the government began aiming to use early education centers to create a more equal society, similar to the goal of the US "Head Start" programs. To this end, in 2012, the Israeli government began to include preschools for children ages 3-6 in the education system, making these frameworks both free and mandatory, though it still referred to childcare as a way to encourage women to work.
Following the Supreme Court and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara's insistence that the children of haredi draft-evaders - and only these children - be ineligible for daycare subsidies, the haredi parties began to seek workarounds. Among these was a proposal to make "education" both free and mandatory for all children ages three months and older, so as to ensure that no one could revoke the parents' right to free childcare. Another, more recent proposal sought to enshrine the mother's right to a daycare subsidy as her own, regardless and without consideration for her husband's employment or enlistment status.
But what Israel must do at this crossroads is take a step back and think: Today, in the twenty-first century, what is our goal in providing daycare subsidies? And who is the target beneficiary?
There are three possible answers - all legitimate, but Israel must now choose between them:
1. Mothers are the intended beneficiaries: This means that the subsidy depends on the mother only, and no man's actions may strip her of this right to subsidized childcare. If the point is that this is a subsidy to encourage women who would otherwise stay home after birth, to work, then it isn't supposed to be for men at all - not single men, not gay men, and not hyper-focused on any woman's husband. Single mothers make sense, men do not. And since when is it ok to condition a woman's anything on what a man does?
If single mothers get subsidies, and two women who did not serve in the IDF due to pacificism can get subsidies, women married to yeshiva students who didn't serve in the IDF are just as eligible. Currently, a single mother is subsidized and a married woman is penalized because of what her husband does or doesn't do.
Unless, of course, we decide that the subsidy isn't for women after all, and then we should declare it for families, not for women. Something quietly similar happened in 2013, when the focus and terminology shifted from encouraging "women" to work to encouraging "parents" to work. But nothing official was ever declared, or voted on - these quiet changes were the result of the Labor Ministry's work following discussions in a Knesset committee.
2. Families are the intended beneficiaries: This means that the subsidy depends on the hours both parents work, regardless of the parents' genders. In such a case, Israel sees the family unit as either eligible or ineligible, based on the number of hours both parents work (separately or combined) and their combined income. Israel has started moving in this direction, but it is not quite official, and the current situation behooves the Knesset to bring the matter for a vote.
If Israel chooses this route, the Knesset should explicitly pass a law stating that the daycare subsidy is a family-oriented discount, and seek to divert funds to lower-earning families. In such a case, stipulations can be made that both parents must work, but that stipulation should be across the board and apply to all sectors equally.
3. Children are the intended beneficiaries: Whether childcare is desirable or not will remain an ongoing debate, but children whose parents send them to unsupervised childcare frameworks are largely at risk for maltreatment and neglect. Supervised facilities, however, are generally more expensive and become unaffordable for families who are ineligible for childcare subsidies; these families thus tend to prefer home frameworks run by a recommended provider, which tend to be cheaper per month, even if they offer less hours of care.
If Israel chooses to make children the intended beneficiaries of its childcare subsidies, it should expand the supervised care options in neighborhoods where there are fewer of these options, and condition subsidies on a combination of the family's income combined with the number of children requiring care.
This option, however, is unlikely to find favor in the eyes of the center-left and politically activist Supreme Court, but a potential solution for the long term would be to link subsidized childcare to frameworks which teach the core curriculum. How such a mechanism would work remains unclear; what is clear is that it will not happen soon and will require thorough planning.
Israel can also choose two of these beneficiaries and attempt to combine them, but what is most important is consistency in messaging and actions, clear rules and understandable logic - without hypocrisy or double standards.
The recent actions of both the Attorney General and Supreme Court, however, risk turning Israel into a tyrannical dictatorship and secular theocracy - a far cry from the "democratic Jewish state of all its citizens" that their center-left supporters claim to long for.
Chana Roberts has lived in Israel since 2006, and is a veteran member of the Arutz Sheva news staff. The mother of five children, she was an educator for several years before joining Arutz Sheva. The Roberts family moved to Jerusalem from Dimona several years ago.