By Abraham Doron
The Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and Social Welfare, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem,Israel
The article deals with the erosion of the insurance principle in the Israeli National Insurance system. As in many countries, the social insurance principle, as established by its founding fathers and formulated by the International Labour Organization, served as the constituent element of the Israeli National Insurance programs. Its goal was to promote solidarity and social cohesion by bringing together workers, employers, other segments of the population and the government to contribute to financing the system and thus providing protection to all against the interruption or loss of the flow of income because of reasons not dependent on the individual, especially at times of rapidly changing economic circumstances.
The National Insurance system providing benefits to all, on a mostly insurance-related basis and closely related to citizenship thus became the cornerstone of the Israeli welfare state. It progressively abandoned the principle of need in the provision of benefits and relegated the use of income and means testing to a residual role in providing public income support. The gradual erosion of these social insurance principles in recent years will have the effect of essentially changing the nature of the system. The impact of such a change will be the return of the country to an earlier stage of evolution of the welfare state and its system of income protection. As in other countries, the decline of support for the social insurance base of income protection in Israel is closely related to societal changes that have taken place in recent years. The changing attitude towards the welfare state, large scale immigration and the resulting ethno-culture change in the composition of the population, globalization and the decline in the industrial labor force, demographic changes and others, have all contributed to change of attitudes towards the social insurance model of social protection.