And that does not include the occupied territories.
HEVER: OECD is an organization that publishes statistics. It also gives some prestige to its members because it's supposed to be an organization of developed democracies. That's why Israel tried so hard to become a member, and as soon as Israel became a member of the OECD in 2010 the OECD started publishing very unflattering statistics about Israel, and this is one of them. Inequality in Israel is extreme. And that's very interesting considering the fact that Israel used to be, in 1965, one of the most equal economies in the world, at least in the non-communist world. And over these last 69 years Israel became the second-most unequal economy in the developed world. Second after the United States.
But if we look at the statistics a bit deeper we see that also the inequality in Israel and the inequality in the United States is not the same. The United States being one of the most capitalistic economies in the world has very extreme inequality, but the inequality in the United States is focused in the top. There are millionaires and there are billionaires, and the inequality amongst them is very stark. But people who live in poverty in the United States, there are quite a lot of those. They don't have such widely varying income levels compared to each other.
While in Israel it's a different situation. In Israel there is an elite of wealthy millionaires and a few billionaires as well, but the inequality is focused at the bottom. And that's very special, because the people living in poverty in Israel, some of them are actually living in poverty levels comparable to the poverty levels that you see in Western democracies, such as in the United States. But there are also entire populations that live in levels of poverty which are akin to those in developing countries. And that inequality is very clearly traced according to ethnic and national lines because of very entrenched institutional discrimination against minorities in Israel.