What impact does the Hezbollah war have along the northern border? – Israel News
Months of rocket and drone attacks and the escalation in northern Israel could have lasting effects on employment in the region, says Inbar Bezek, a former member of the Israeli Knesset and current CEO of the Galilee Economic Company.
The attacks, which led to the evacuation of all residents within 3.5 kilometers of the border, could continue to displace and keep people away even after the war, Bezek said.
A significant proportion of the region’s population is employed in four sectors, all of which have been severely damaged by the conflict in the north: tourism, construction, agriculture and traditional industries.
Major challenges lie ahead
The largest of these sectors is industry, which employs around 20 percent of the region’s population, Bezek explained. Many of the factories in the north are wholly or partially foreign-owned, Bezek said. This means that many foreigners could leave the country and take jobs with them.
“If the owners are not Israeli, they ask themselves, ‘Why do I need all this trouble?'” she says, adding that factories are already exploring options for relocation. In the best case, they stay in Israel; in the worst case, many leave the country.
These companies and factories face three major challenges: many of their workers have been evacuated and are not working, suppliers are struggling to deliver raw materials to factories near the border, and many workers are not coming to work in areas where they do not feel safe, even if they have not been officially evacuated.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the government sees the evacuation line as a compensation line, Bezek said. “The Ministry of Defense decided to evacuate people up to 3.5 kilometers from the border, so the Ministry of Finance said: ‘Okay, I will compensate the one who was evacuated, and for those who were not evacuated, it will be business as usual.'”
“It is a mistake to look at it that way,” she said, citing as an example the situation where a worker lives five kilometers from the border but is employed in an evacuated city where shops are closed.
“You are not entitled to anything from the state, but your workplace is closed,” says Bezek, explaining that these workers were offered unemployment benefits in the form of unpaid leave. This solution applied to all Israelis during the war, but there was no special solution for residents of the north.
The opposite problem also applies, Bezek explained. For companies that are not located in evacuated areas but employ many evacuees, it is difficult to maintain their operations. These evacuees cannot be laid off, but the government has not yet paid back the wages that continue to be paid to the companies that employ them, Bezek said.
This is not the only government funding that has been paid out late, Bezek said. Grants that were supposed to cover the months of January and February were already dealt with in May, and grants for March and April were discussed in the Knesset in June, Bezek said.
“I hear heartbreaking stories,” she said, citing a widowed mother who owns a small business who told her that the grants she receives go straight into the negatives in her bank account and that her account has been almost closed several times.
Bezek assumes that this policy of late payments is determined by the Minister of Finance, who wants to prevent companies that know these criteria from “cheating” or “exploiting the system”.
“This is nonsense because logically the criteria (for eligibility) are not changed every month,” she said, adding that the government must give people security and certainty that they will be taken care of if their employment or business is damaged by the war.
Businesses within nine kilometers of the border have been offered financial help, but individuals outside the evacuation zone have not, and many businesses just outside the nine-kilometer zone are unable to operate because of the war, Bezek said.
She cited a rafting company on the Jordan River, about eleven kilometers from the border, as an example, as not being eligible for funding, but she explained that absolutely no one would go rafting that far north.
It is crucial not only to promote employment in northern Israel, but also to support quality employment and quality jobs to ensure that young people and stronger populations remain in the region, she said.
Partly because of the region’s incredibly diverse climatic conditions, which enable research, the North has the potential to become a centre for food and agricultural technology, said Bezek, adding that a lot of investment has been made in this area over the past eight years.
After October 7, over 90 percent of the 81 food and agri-tech companies left the region, she said. If these companies do not return or are not replaced by technology companies or other companies that provide quality jobs, the north will be set back ten years in terms of job opportunities and attractiveness to young people, she explained.
Surveys have shown that about 40 percent of evacuees do not consider returning to the north, said Bezek. He explained that those who do not return are likely to be those who have the opportunity to resettle, leaving the socioeconomically weaker population groups in the north behind, exacerbating existing inequality.
The north and its well-being are of central importance to Israel, Bezek said: “The fields of Metulla that separate the houses of the city from Lebanon, the fields of Misgav Am that separate the border from the houses – they are the border.”
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