Israel's Anti-Concentration Law

Israel's Anti-Concentration Law, formally “A Law for Promotion of Competition and Reduction of Concentration”, is a law passed in December 2013 which seeks to reduce the size of existing large Israeli business groups organized in a pyramidal holding structures, separate financial holdings from non-financial holdings and prevent new pyramids from being formed.

The law was approved by Israel’s Knesset with no objections and included both coalition and opposition parties: 42 coalition Knesset members and 30 opposition Knesset members voted for the law, an extremely rare result in the Knesset’s history.

The Anti-Concentration Law is arguably the broadest-reaching economic policy measure taken by an Israeli government since the 1985 Israel Economic Stabilization Plan, which helped the country fight hyperinflation. In a January 7, 2014, New York Times article titled “Overhaul of Israel’s Economy Offers Lessons for United States” Steven Davidoff wrote that “with a single bill and a few big changes in its corporate law, Israel is looking to overhaul its economy and hopefully reduce income inequality”.

The law followed the creation of a committee, in October 24, 2010, the final recommendations of which were handed in February 2012. The committee’s work has taken a dramatic turn and accelerated considerably following the wave of social justice protests that swept Israel during the summer of 2011.

The issue of the concentration of economic power in few hands and its effect on competitiveness, prices, productivity, innovation and politics and lawmaking was campaigned for since 2008 by TheMarker, a leading Israeli business publication.

An October 15, 2015 article in Financial Times stated that: “…it is the role that the business newspaper TheMarker has played in Israel in exposing the effect on the national economy of the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few billionaires”.

In a March 23, 2015 article titled “ How To Fix American Journalism” in The Nation, Michael Massing wrote: “… TheMarker, an Israeli financial newspaper distributed as a supplement to Haaretz, waged an unflagging campaign beginning in the mid-2000s against the extraordinary concentration of economic power in Israel and the dangers that this development posed to Israeli society and democracy. Led by its founding editor, Guy Rolnik, the paper ran periodic stories and columns that paid special attention to the ‘Israeli oligarchs,’ a small group of billionaires and their families who controlled much of the Israeli economy. When the campaign began, the subject of economic concentration was barely discussed in Israel. The stories fed growing outrage over inequality, leading to a series of mass demonstrations in 2011. Those protests, in turn, spurred the Knesset to pass a bill to break up the Israeli conglomerates. It was a remarkable display of how one news organization, through tenacious and unflinching reporting over a period of years, can help spur systemic change.”

...
Wikipedia