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Why Israel’s new right-wing leaders immediately made plastic plates inexpensive again
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Devora Zien’s tiny apartment in Bnei Brak runs like a factory, but, she admits, not a very smooth one. With 12 mouths to feed three times a day, single-use plasticware is a basic necessity, she says. So when Israel’s then-Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman increased taxes on disposables in 2021, Zien said she was “in total shock.”
“For me, it’s more important than bread and milk,” she said. “It’s about survival. I can’t stand in front of the kitchen sink all day washing dishes — and where would I put a dishwasher even if I could afford one?”
Liberman’s tax on disposable dinnerware, as well as another set of taxes he imposed as finance minister on sugar-filled soft drinks, were viewed by many ultra-Orthodox Israelis as unfairly targeting their lifestyle and cynically using health and environmental considerations to single out their community.
This week, after Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was sworn in, Liberman’s successor, Bezalel Smotrich, in his first move as finance minister, signed orders repealing the tax hikes on disposables and sugary drinks.
Ultra-Orthodox lawmakers hailed the move, as did many in the broader haredi population. Images made the rounds on social media of haredi men celebrating the decision by drinking Cristal Mint, a low-in-price, high-in-sugar soda, from disposable plastic cups. Beyond the relief felt by members of the community, there was also a sense that the balance in Israel’s cultural war is once again tipping in their favor.
MK Uri Maklev of the haredi United Torah Judaism party, said the tax reversal underscored the new government’s policy of “working for the citizens and not against them.”
Israel is either the world’s top or second-biggest consumer of disposable tableware per capita, depending on the analysis, making the goods a natural target for environmental activists. And the taxes were projected to bring in $350 million annually to the country’s treasury, no small amount. That’s nearly twice, for example, what the city of Jerusalem spends each year on sanitation.
But the disposables were Liberman’s only target for environmental taxes, which came as he sought to address Israel’s high cost of living by cutting taxes on other goods. And no environmental activist himself, Liberman is well known for his fierce criticism of Israel’s haredi sector, which he says contributes too little to the country through work and army service.
Avigdor Liberman, center, holds a news conference following the dissolving of the Israeli parliament, in Tel Aviv, May 30, 2019. (Flash90)
“The only thing that matters to him is sticking his finger in our eye,” said Devora’s sister-in-law Yael Zien, a media personality who advocates on behalf of Israel’s haredi population. She went on to cite Liberman’s widely condemned statement that he would send haredi Jews on “wheelbarrows straight to the dumpster.”
“You can’t compare your average, secular, two-car family that orders takeaway, with the haredis. We also host far more family functions than any other sector,” Zien said. “Why not raise taxes on a second car? Or flights overseas?”
“Haredim are actually more green than anyone else. We buy less clothes, we don’t fly abroad, and our communities rely heavily on gmachim and passing things on,” she said, referring to the free-loan establishments that provide anything from baby bottles to evening gowns.
Though the taxation touched on a sensitive nerve and was viewed by both sides as another round in the cultural war between secular and Orthodox Israelis, when the dust settled, it turned out that both sides may actually agree on some important issues.
Despite saying she reacted with “ecstasy” to Smotrich’s moves, Zien is not entirely opposed to reinstating the taxes, but this time with cooperation from the affected parties and a multi-pronged approach. Addressing the sugary drinks, Zien believes that the government should have taken steps in parallel to raise awareness in haredi society about the danger of diabetes and not just enforce acts that could be interpreted as punitive.
Yael Zien, a haredi Orthodox personality and mother, said she opposed the tax on disposables — as it was enacted, not on principle. (Courtesy of Yael Zien)
Meanwhile, environmental activists, who had marveled at the taxation on plastic dishes, are willing to admit that Liberman might have paid too little attention to the needs of haredi communities.
Yael Gini, community director at Sustainable Development Goals Israel, noted that tax hikes are just one way to combat waste, and not necessarily the most optimal. Targeting businesses or public places with a blanket ban on disposables, as France enacted this week in what activists are calling a watershed moment, might have been a more prudent first step, she said.
“It’s a shame it came to this. This isn’t sectorial but it feels like it is. [Politicians] turned it into something political and the haredim are right about that,” said Gini, formerly a program director at Greenpeace.
“But [the haredim] need to understand, it’s not an us-versus-them situation,” she said, adding that the environmental impact of Israel’s use of disposables is “a disaster for everyone.”
Despite the political uproar created by the decision to tax single use dinnerware, anecdotal evidence shows it might have been effective, especially for haredi Orthodox families living on a tight budget. Data published in April 2022 by the Ministry of Environment indicated that purchase of single-use plastics in supermarkets had dropped nearly 50% since the taxes were imposed six months earlier. Critics of this survey noted, however, that it did not take into consideration the haredi community’s tendency to shop at convenience stores and to make large purchases before Jewish holidays.
A man shops for disposable plastic tableware in the Osher Ad Supermarket branch in Givat Shaul, Jerusalem, Oct. 27, 2021. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
For Leah, a Hasidic Orthodox mother of seven living in the cloistered Bukharian neighborhood of Jerusalem, Liberman’s policy worked.
“We finally got around to toivelling a dinner set that we had been gifted years before,” she said, referencing the Jewish practice of immersing dishes and utensils in a ritual pool to ensure that they can be used with kosher food.
She also went to IKEA to buy other multi-use items like casserole dishes and admits that she would not have made the trip had plasticware remained affordable. “Life is fast-paced and that was one less thing to worry about,” she said.
The adjustment took time and there were bumps in the road. “Many plates got broken, the children argued all the time over cups, but we got through it. I bought each child their own set and encouraged them to wash it.” Leah, who asked that her last name not be printed, has very little exposure to current affairs and was not aware of Smotrich’s rollback. While the move means she would probably allow herself to be less frugal about buying plastics in the future, she was unlikely to go back entirely to the way things were before, she said.
“It’s nice to eat Shabbat meals on real plates,” Leah said. “It feels more special.”
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Drunk with power, Donald Trump follows the dictates of Athenian commanders — and a certain Jewish philosopher
The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must.
This phrase has been invoked by political pundits and leaders, including the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, over the past few days as the world was plunged into Donald Trump’s fever dream of the conquest of Greenland. Yet what they neglected to mention is the quotation’s source and context in which it was uttered.
But both are crucial if we are to fully appreciate the troubling relevance of the phrase and the somber light the German-Jewish thinker Leo Strauss cast on it.
The phrase first crops up in the History of the Peloponnesian War, the ancient Athenian historian Thucydides’ account of one of the most consequential events in the history of the West. In the midst of their war against Sparta, an Athenian fleet lands on the small island of Melos, which they have been ordered to annex or annihilate. The dialogue that follows is entirely the creation of Thucydides, who strips away what he believed were the pleasant fictions we tell to blind ourselves to the reality of human nature.
Despite the Melian delegation’s appeals, the Athenian commanders are unmoved. “Nature always compels men to rule over anyone they can control,” they tell the Melians.“We did not make this law…but we will take it as we found it and leave it to posterity forever, because we know that you would do the same if you had our power as would anyone else.”
Yet the Athenians are tragically blind to the corollary: Human beings will always resist and rebel against those who try to invade them. When the Melians refused to submit, the Athenians were as good as their word; upon breaching the city walls, they slaughtered the men and sold the women and children into slavery. Shortly later, full of their conviction that might makes right, the Athenians decide to invade Sicily — an act of hubris which leads to a catastrophic defeat and a fate like the one they meted out to the Melians.
These world-altering events bring us to Leo Strauss, the man who Harold Bloom once described as a “political philosopher and Hebraic sage.” Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in 1899, by the 1930’s Strauss had won the reputation as a brilliant and not always orthodox political theorist. With the rise of Nazism, Bloom had the means and foresight to quit his native country in 1937. He became something of an itinerant intellectual, finding a series of academic appointments at Columbia University, University of Chicago, and the New School while writing many of his best-known books, including Natural Right and History and Thoughts on Machiavelli.
Over time, Strauss also became known as the éminence grise of neo-conservatism, the hawkish postwar ideology that viewed foreign policy through the harsh lens of political realism and has been credited with influencing the Bush Administration’s cataclysmic decision to invade Iraq. For his critics, it hardly helped that Strauss was influenced by the writings of the Nazi-adjacent and antisemitic legal theorist Carl Schmitt, who favored strong executive authority and believed that the politics of a nation and policies of the state must respond to the distinction between friend and enemy.
An advocate of “reading between the lines,” Strauss basically sets the traditional interpretation of Thucydides and the significance of the Melian dialogue on its head. Most students of Thucydides believe he sides with Pericles, the Athenian leader who, in his famous funeral oration, declares his city as the school for all of Greece. And why not? Thanks to its openness to ideas and debate, Athens excelled in the arts and sciences. No less important, thanks to its sense of civic responsibility, the city’s citizen army excelled in military prowess and power.
That this shining example of democracy should, at the end of a two-decade war, have been defeated and occupied by brutish if not barbaric Sparta marks one of history’s great tragedies. And yet, Strauss suggests we misunderstand the nature of the tragedy. The Periclean vision is inspiring, he allows, but it was also the reason why Athens lost the war. Strauss claims that Thucydides knew this as well. Just like his contemporary Plato, the ancient historian instead thought the best of all models was the closed society of Sparta rather than the open society of Athens.
By “best,” what Strauss meant is that cities like Sparta are best positioned to maintain the endurance and stability of the state and those who look to it for their security. In turn, this requires such states to embrace what he called the “Athenian thesis” which boils down to the claim made by the Athenian commander at Melos: The strong, indifferent to justice or moderation, do what they can while the weak suffer what is meted out to them. After all, Athens was itself an expanding empire that absorbed other cities into its alliance whether they wished to join or not.
Of course, we have no idea what Strauss would have thought about Donald Trump’s efforts to slap tariffs on islands inhabited only by penguins and annex other islands inhabited by people who have made clear they have no desire to become American. But I suspect that Strauss would remind us that the relentless pursuit of power and property is not unique to narcissistic sociopaths. Instead, states are almost always and necessarily driven by the will to expand. And therein lies the true tragedy.
The post Drunk with power, Donald Trump follows the dictates of Athenian commanders — and a certain Jewish philosopher appeared first on The Forward.
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120th anniversary of the Forverts advice column “Bintel Brief”
מזל־טובֿ! דעם 20סטן יאַנואַר 2026 איז געוואָרן 120 יאָר זינט דער גרינדונג פֿון „אַ בינטל בריוו“ — דער עצות־רובריק פֿונעם פֿאָרווערטס. די רובריק איז פֿאַרלייגט געוואָרן פֿונעם גרינדער און לאַנגיאָריקן שעף־רעדאַקטאָר אַב קאַהאַן אין 1906.
כּדי אָפּצומערקן דעם יום־טובֿ ברענגען מיר אײַך צוויי זאַכן:
• ערשטנס, אַן אַרטיקל וועגן אַ טשיקאַווען בריוו וואָס איז אָנגעקומען אין דער פֿאָרווערטס־רעדאַקציע אין יאַנואַר 1949, פֿון אַ לייענער וועמעס זון האָט חתונה געהאַט מיט אַ קריסטלעכער פֿרוי
• צווייטנס, אַ פֿאָרווערטס־ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש וועגן דער געשיכטע פֿון „אַ בינטל בריוו“, מיטן געוועזענעם פֿאָרווערטס־רעדאַקטאָר באָריס סאַנדלער און דער פֿאָרווערטס־אַרכיוויסטקע חנה פּאָלאַק.
The post 120th anniversary of the Forverts advice column “Bintel Brief” appeared first on The Forward.
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Report: Khamenei Moved to Underground Bunker in Tehran
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks in a televised message, after the ceasefire between Iran and Israel, in Tehran, Iran, June 26, 2025. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
i24 News – Amid tense expectation of US strike on key assets of the Islamic regime, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was moved into a special underground bunker in Tehran, the Iran International website reported on Saturday.
The report further added that the supreme leader’s third son Masoud Khamenei has taken over day-to-day management of the leader’s office, functioning as the de facto main channel for coordination vis-à-vis the executive branches of the government and the security forces.
The report describes Khamenei’s hideout as a “fortified site with interconnected tunnels.”
On Thursday US President Donald Trump said that a “massive” naval force was heading toward Iran.
“We have a lot of ships going that direction just in case. We have a big flotilla going in that direction. And we’ll see what happens,” Trump told reporters.
“We have an armada. We have a massive fleet heading in that direction, and maybe we won’t have to use it. We’ll see,” Trump added.
The USS Abraham Lincoln, along with three destroyers, was spotted making its way to the Middle East from Asia, according to ship-tracking data.