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 supply chains, in northern communities emptied and businesses shuttered, in lost tourism, in defense procurement, have never been comprehensively disclosed to the public. That opacity is its own form of policy.
Reserve duty is the invisible tax of Israeli wartime. When a software engineer, a construction worker, a restaurant owner disappears into miluim for weeks or months, the cost does not appear in any defense budget line. It appears in the family that misses a mortgage payment, the small business that loses its most experienced employee, the startup that misses its funding window. These costs are real, they are enormous, and they are borne almost entirely by one segment of Israeli society.
The north of Israel offers perhaps the starkest economic case study. Communities along the Lebanese border were evacuated for months. Businesses closed, some permanently. Farms went unharvested. The psychological and financial toll on the Galilee’s economy will take years to assess fully, and the government, consumed by security communications, has offered little honest accounting of the reconstruction challenge.
Meanwhile, Israel’s defense ministry is procuring new F-35I and F-15IA squadrons, following the Iran war. This is funded from a national budget already under severe pressure, and the tradeoffs, in healthcare, education, infrastructure, are not being debated transparently in the public square.
There is a version of Israeli public discourse that treats economic concerns as secondary to security ones, as if raising the cost of living during wartime is somehow unpatriotic. This is exactly backwards. A country that cannot sustain the economic wellbeing of its working families cannot sustain a long war. The two are not in tension. They are the same question.
Every Country’s greatest strategic asset has always been its people, their ingenuity, their resilience, their willingness to serve. That asset is not inexhaustible. The salary-price gap widening in the middle of an unresolved military conflict is not a minor data point. It is a warning signal.
“A country that cannot sustain the economic wellbeing of its working families cannot sustain a long war.”
What is needed now is not comfort. It is transparency. Israelis deserve a full public accounting of what these thirty months have cost, in money, in manpower, in opportunity foregone, and a serious, politically honest debate about how the burden is being shared.
The question of who pays for war is not a left-wing question or a right-wing one, and it is, right now, being almost entirely avoided.
That cannot last much longer.
Farwa Imtiaz is a researcher and writer specializing in Middle Eastern affairs, South Asian geopolitics, international relations, and conflict studies. She holds Master’s degree in Peace and Conflict Studies and writes on diplomacy, security, regional politics, and global affairs.