Israel’s Economic Breakdown After Months of Fighting
Somewhere between the missile alerts and the diplomatic communiqués, Israel’s economic story has gone largely untold. Not the macroeconomic headline numbers, those get reported, but the granular, human-scale story of what thirty months of multi-front war has done to ordinary Israeli life.
It is a story worth telling, because it is the story most Israelis are actually living. News has begun to notice the edges of it. “Israel is getting more expensive. Our salaries aren’t. That gap is becoming dangerous,” read one recent headline. It is one of the most honest sentences written about Israeli domestic life in months, but it was treated as an economic observation, not a political one. It is, in fact, both.
The US has publicly acknowledged that its share of the Iran war cost $25 billion so far, mostly in munitions. Israel’s costs, in reserve duty, in disrupted........
