Missing My Turn to Get Rich

Two unnoticed changes in Israel's building permits "industry" are causing me problems: One, the Government is starting to tackle the illegal building activity that has brought us a situation that most of the public land has been occupied by unrecognized villages, of Jewish settlers in Samaria but specially by the Bedouins in the Negev. In the past, the Government ignored the intensive building taking place in Arab villages. The Arabs and their Jewish friends had an effective international lobby that made almost impossible to bulldoze a standing and occupied building. The European Union would protest the inhumanity of throwing into the streets a poor Arab family of an aged sheikh with four wives and twenty little innocent children. The EU would automatically fund the rebuilding of the structure in the same place. Encouraged by  President Trump's backing, Netanyahu's last government started to act and illegal buildings are being bulldozed by the hundreds and the pics published in the media. It has caused a panic in the Arab but mostly in the Jewish sectors. This year, everybody is trying desperately go legal and to get a permit.

Second, the permitting bureaucracy has been strengthened and an additional layer of inspectors has been added. Once, the drawing plans were signed by non-professional bureaucrats, but now they are studied by dedicated full time specialists that enforce all the regulations and standards. These new inspectors enjoy their power of rejecting drawings for minor errors even if the error is non-compliance with a long-forgotten, never-enforced, idiotic colonial-era municipal order.

The result is that I have been inundated with work orders and the prices have doubled. It is a veritable bonanza for permitting engineers like me, with twenty years of activity and a wide network of contacts and publications. This bonanza arrives when I am about to close shop, as I am a generation after retirement age and losing patience with the mindless bureaucracy. Just when my window of opportunity to get rich arrives, I am too old. I shall miss it. As my father used to say, "Son, you will have to inherit less".