Nearly 800 students gathered at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem last week to hear Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu speak on “Israel’s Economy and Its Future.”

The lecture hall contained only 350 seats, so hundreds of disappointed students had to leave. But those who did attend despite the heavy, time-consuming frisking by university security men – who nevertheless managed to allow in several communist hecklers wearing Che Guevara T-shirts – were very impressed.

Standing in front of a board, drawing graphs and underscoring points and numbers, Netanyahu proved again his capacity to captivate audiences, even an audience of generally hostile university students.

Netanyahu’s lecture and the ensuing discussion lasted for almost two hours and covered many topics. He engaged his audience in an often-humorous dialogue and kept them in rapt attention. When the Che Guevara brigade attempted to sabotage the meeting with catcalls and long loud altercations, the students silenced and evicted them before the university representatives made a move.

Netanyahu first addressed the iron triangle of monopoly costs, high taxes and high transfer payments that choked off growth, increased unemployment and kept so many families poor. While the population grew in the past 12 years by about 33 percent, the number of those drawing welfare payments increased by an incredible 600% and the number of the poor grew exponentially too; this not despite, but because of the extraordinary growth in welfare, which encourages people not to work and develop a dependency on welfare. High monopoly costs of every consumer item force more families into poverty and the welfare ranks. Assisting them forces government to increase taxes, creating greater unemployment and so the cycle goes on.

Netanyahu cited figures pointing to the connection between poverty and unemployment. They showed a sharp drop in the number of the poor among those employed. He laid to rest charges often voiced in university circles that free markets increase inequality and hurt the poor, and demonstrated how freer markets in fact increase employment and enhance equality.

Netanyahu also explained the crucial role he thinks the forthcoming financial reforms will play in a better allocation of investments, and how this will translate into economic growth and on better and more employment.

TWO OTHER issues addressed by Netanyahu were land use and tourism. “It is time to break up the strangling monopoly of the Israel Lands Administration,” Netanyahu declared, “and supply reasonably priced land, especially to the young so that they do not have to mortgage their future just to get decent housing.”

The administration, which controls 93% of Israel’s land mass, is dominated by the agricultural lobby, namely kibbutzim and moshavim that were given control of large tracts of land for agricultural use. Now they are converting this land into very high-priced real-estate domains.

The Jewish National Fund also wants to hold on to its power. As I’ve argued, between JNF and the lands administration land prices in Israel have skyrocketed. They work in cahoots with the banks and with the land assessor’s guild serving those banks. Together they all fight to keep land prices outrageously high despite the huge damage this does. It is time to loosen their grip.

Netanyahu told the students that a quick pickup in the tourism industry will solve the unemployment problem of less skilled labor – workers who would not otherwise benefit from prosperity in the hi-tech or export sector.

He therefore promulgated two plans that would impact on Israel’s periphery, on the Negev and Galilee. In the Galilee he proposes to attract millions of Christian believers who may want to walk in the footsteps of Jesus by leasing tracts of land to their congregations and letting them build their own facilities. In the Negev he would attract tourists looking for sun and fun by allowing well-regulated gambling that, as in Las Vegas, also draws large-scale family tourism.

When Netanyahu concluded the students gave him a five-minute standing ovation, a most unusual occurrence after a university lecture and an extraordinary reaction considering the years of indoctrination of Israeli students by neo-Marxist professors who consider Netanyahu an enemy of the people.

It seems that courses offered in recent years to university students about the free market and its critics, courses attended by close to a thousand students thus far, have counteracted some of the anti-capitalist attitudes so prevalent in the universities.

Responding to a report on a popular Web site, one which tried to put a negative spin on the event and mock Netanyahu and his message, a student wrote: “Whoever was not there cannot even imagine what a high-caliber person our finance minister is. No amount of manipulation and lies by the media will succeed in changing this. The university hall was crowded with students who had a very negative view of Netanyahu, but when the lecture ended they stood up and cheered. Only four from among the crowd of hundreds booed him. It was very worthwhile to listen to what the man had to say and not to the demagoguery dispensed by the media.”

“We never had a far-sighted politician like Bibi who dared slaughter the sacred cows of Israeli politics,” summed up another one.

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