Avraham Shochat

Shochat was born in Tel Aviv on June 14, 1936, to Fania and Zvi Shochat; his father worked as a construction foreman at Solel Boneh.[1][6] His mother gave him the nickname “Beiga,” or “Beigele,” by which he became widely known.[1]

He served as an Israel Defense Forces paratrooper in 1956–1957 and was a member of Kibbutz Nahal Oz.[7] Recalling his military service in a later interview, he described working in construction at Nahal Oz while residents faced bombardment from the Gaza Strip, with damaged water-carrier pipes used as shelters.[8] From 1957 to 1961, he studied construction engineering at the Technion in Haifa, where he chaired the Student Council.[7]

In 1959, he married Tama, a daughter of former prime minister Levi Eshkol; the couple had three children.[9] They were among the 30 founding families who moved to build Arad in the Negev.[1]

From 1961 to 1963, Shochat worked on the team led by Arie Lova Eliav that planned Arad.[7] His engineering work included designing some of the town’s first neighborhoods.[1] Between 1963 and 1967, he was Solel Boneh’s regional director for Arad and the Dead Sea area.[7] This work joined municipal planning with regional construction management in the developing Negev town.[1][7]

Arad held its first council elections in 1967, when its population was below 4,000; Shochat was elected council head and subsequently reelected three times.[9] Accounts place the end of his tenure in 1988 or 1989.[6][7] During part of his municipal tenure, he was deputy chairman of the Local Government Center and chaired its Development Town Committee.[7]

A Labor Party member, Shochat made an unsuccessful bid for the Knesset in 1984 and ran the party’s membership census in 1985.[1][7] He entered the Eleventh Knesset in May 1988, replacing Aharon Harel following Harel’s resignation.[7] Later that year, he headed Labor’s election staff for the Twelfth Knesset campaign and won a parliamentary seat in his own right.[1][7] In the Twelfth Knesset, he first chaired the Economics Committee and then the Finance Committee, remaining in the latter position until February 1991.[7]

After his Finance Committee chairmanship, Shochat prepared Labor’s economic platform for the Thirteenth Knesset election.[7] The platform identified areas requiring government involvement while accepting the privatization of some government-owned corporations—the first such acceptance in a Labor economic platform.[7] He supported Yitzhak Rabin in the February 1992 Labor leadership primary and became finance minister in the government Rabin formed after the election.[7][10]

Rabin appointed Shochat finance minister in July 1992.[2] He retained the portfolio under Shimon Peres after Rabin’s assassination and served until Labor’s defeat in the 1996 election.[2] Accounts of the period describe faster economic growth and lower unemployment, alongside a deteriorating trade deficit and rising inflation beginning in 1995.[7] His public duties included presenting the 1994 budget and attending an economic conference on February 28, 1994.[11][12]

Shochat chaired Israel’s delegation in economic negotiations with the PLO, alongside Ahmad Quri, known as Abu Ala.[13] The Paris talks began in mid-November 1993 and covered banking, currency, foreign-exchange controls, customs duties, value-added tax, and income tax.[13] The resulting agreement was signed on April 29, 1994, and formed the economic annex to the Oslo Accords.[6][13]

Following the February 25, 1994 Hebron massacre and restrictions on Palestinian workers entering Israel, the government prepared an assistance plan for affected workers.[14] Rabin approved the plan in principle, but final approval from Shochat and Maj.-Gen. Danny Rothschild was still pending when its estimated monthly cost was put at $5 million to $6.6 million.[14] A separate compensation arrangement for people wounded in the shooting provided payments ranging from approximately $8,300 for slight injuries to about $70,000 for serious injuries or for fathers of six or more children.[14] The Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs withheld details until Shochat signed the arrangement.[14]

In 1994, Shochat sought a 10 percent tax on capital gains from stock-market investments.[3] In a later interview, he recalled securing Bank of Israel Governor Jacob Frenkel’s support and Rabin’s backing despite opposition from business figures.[3] The legislation passed, but implementation stalled because banks had difficulty calculating gains on investments dating from before its intended January 1995 start.[3] Shochat recalled trying again after returning to the Finance Ministry in 1999, only for the Barak government’s fall to prevent passage.[3]

Infrastructure investment expanded during his first finance-minister tenure.[4] Road-infrastructure budgets rose from NIS 800 million to NIS 2.5 billion, while wastewater investment increased from NIS 15 million in 1991 to NIS 700 million during his tenure, supported by subsidized interest and grants.[4] In 1993, he established the Cross-Israel Highway Company and advanced the necessary legislation, launching Israel’s first build-operate-transfer project.[4]

In 1995, following David Levy’s departure from Likud, Shochat expressed hope for “parliamentary cooperation” with him.[15] After Labor returned to opposition in the Fourteenth Knesset, Shochat served as its coordinator on the Finance Committee.[7] Following Ehud Barak’s election as prime minister and Shochat’s election to the Fifteenth Knesset in 1999, he returned to the Finance Ministry.[7][16] He served in the portfolio until 2001.[2]

At the beginning of his second term, Shochat identified economic stability, job creation, and responsible economic administration as government priorities.[17] He said his previous ministerial experience would help advance modernization and growth, including growth connected to the peace process.[17] After Shas left the government, he also became minister of national infrastructures.[7]

In August 2000, Shochat directed the Finance Ministry to issue Israel’s first desalination tender, initially for 50 million cubic meters annually, with an option to double that amount that was subsequently exercised.[4] The winning bid was 52 cents per cubic meter, below the ministry’s anticipated price of 65–70 cents.[4] He pressed ahead with desalination planning despite opposition from senior Treasury officials and concerns about its cost, seeking a response to Israel’s chronic water shortages.[4][7]

Shochat was not chosen as a Labor minister in Ariel Sharon’s government formed in 2001 or when Labor joined Sharon’s second government in 2005.[7] At the Aharon Yariv Memorial Conference on the State of the Nation on May 20, 2001, attended by more than 600 people, he joined Ruth Gavison and Supreme Court Justice Dorit Beinisch in a final-session discussion of Israel’s domestic challenges, concentrating on their economic dimension.[18]

In the Sixteenth Knesset, Shochat chaired the Joint Committee for the Defense Budget.[7] His parliamentary work also included service on the committee for selecting judges.[2] In December 2004, he placed tenth in an internal Labor selection for ministerial posts and did not enter the government.[2] He left the Knesset around the end of 2005 and subsequently served as a director of public companies.[2][8]

In 2006, Shochat headed a committee examining Israel’s higher education system.[5] Its 2007 recommendations addressed academic and financial difficulties and sought to strengthen research, broaden access to higher education, and improve the recruitment and retention of researchers.[19] Proposals included additional institutional and research funding, scholarships and other assistance for lower-income students, and higher tuition accompanied by income-dependent loans.[19] Much of the tuition payment would be deferred until after graduation, with repayment contingent on reaching an income threshold.[19]

Shochat’s work linked the establishment and development of Arad with later national investments in transportation, wastewater treatment, and water supply.[9][4] His municipal career included both planning the town and leading its elected council, while his ministerial work advanced the Cross-Israel Highway project and the introduction of large-scale desalination tenders.[4][7]

A retrospective Jerusalem Post commentary credited his ministerial record with support for the Brodett banking reform, which separated banks from many nonbanking assets, as well as sales of state assets including Israel Chemicals and United Mizrahi Bank.[20] The commentary also identified reductions in state funding for Histadrut pension funds among his economic measures.[20]

His marriage to Tama lasted until her death in 2022.[2][9] Shochat died at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv on February 28, 2024, having recently celebrated the publication of his autobiography, “Between Desert and Treasure.”[2]

Shochat’s first term as finance minister drew criticism over generous wage agreements before the 1996 election and the expansion of fiscal deficits.[2][20] A Jerusalem Post commentary argued that he later acknowledged overheating the economy and exercised greater budgetary discipline upon returning to the Treasury under Barak.[20]

His position on Israel Bonds also prompted debate about Israel’s economic relationship with Diaspora Jewry.[21] A Jerusalem Center analysis recounted his argument that Israel could borrow more cheaply on international markets than through Israel Bonds and interpreted it as challenging an “Israel in need” model of Diaspora relations.[21] The analysis noted that the bonds had helped Israel when international borrowing was difficult, but that cheaper market borrowing had become available by the 1990s, and suggested that Shochat later changed his position.[21]

The higher education committee’s proposal to raise annual tuition from NIS 8,588 to NIS 14,800 met opposition from student leaders, who argued that government agreements required their approval and warned of privatization.[5] Shochat defended the reform as a means of strengthening higher education.[5] In 2011, amid continuing disagreement over future tuition increases, he criticized demands that universities return funds and threats to withhold subsequent budgets for failing to implement the reform, calling the decision “unreasonably hostile towards the higher education system.”[22]

Shochat also defended the underlying aim of the Oslo process while acknowledging its failure, saying in a later interview: “Oslo was not a mistake, but it failed. But the idea of dividing the land and separating from the Palestinians was not a mistake.”[2]