A Decade of Renting in Israel: A Personal Account

This is a cleaned-up, edited version of a dictated first-person account. It serves as the case-study foundation for the rental market policy area.

The most compelling and under-scrutinized issue in Israeli politics is the rental market.

I made Aliyah in 2015, and the rental market has been the single most disheartening and challenging aspect of my time living in Israel. It has been financially punitive, devastating to any sense of permanence, and it has created setback after setback for me and my family. As I record this, we are setting up a new apartment for at least the sixth time in ten years.

How we ended up here

We ended up in this apartment because, in our previous tenancy, a leak began — and when we asked the landlord to commit to a timeline for repair, as is his statutory obligation, we received an aggressive email telling us that our lease would be terminated.

Lease termination is not technically eviction, but it may as well be, because Israel permits what amounts to tenancy at will. My wife and I have a young son — he was thirteen months old by the time we moved — and neither of us has close family in the country. We are our household’s sole providers.

As the leak worsened and mold began forming, I — an asthmatic — had an asthma attack. My wife and I slept on the sofa, our son, then seven months old, crying, and eventually we took refuge in a distant relative’s home. All of this unfolded against the backdrop of the war with Iran, which broke out shortly afterwards.

When the landlord finally came to see the damage, his response was: “I can’t tell you to stay here, but if you don’t want to, you can just leave.” It was very clear he wanted us to simply walk out onto the street. It was equally clear that neither he nor the lawyer he consulted had any personal understanding of how arduous the process of renting and moving in Israel actually is. He also insisted the leak was the responsibility of the va’ad bayit (the building committee) — which was simply not the case. The legal position was crystal clear: the obligation to repair fell squarely on him. Instead, the leak worsened while we searched frantically for somewhere to live.

Not the first time

This was not even the first time this had happened to us. In the apartment before that one, the landlord simply decided to gift the apartment to a family member, forcing us into the same scramble. That move — from Baka to the Jerusalem city center — cost us 10,000 shekels in moving fees alone. That is a huge financial setback, and it makes getting on the property ladder an ever more elusive dream.

My worst experience came in one of my first rentals in Israel. The landlord sent someone to repair a leak in my studio apartment. When I returned from work, I discovered that the person who had been let in to diagnose the leak had taken the liberty of literally ripping out my toilet, reducing the bathroom to a stack of rubble. I lived for several weeks without a usable toilet or shower. When a flood then began destroying my belongings, the contractor told me I should probably just find a new place to live. I had to end that tenancy.

The compounding costs of every move

What compounds the cost of every move is a set of burdens that people who don’t rent — or haven’t rented in years — have no way to understand:

The agent’s fee. Israel technically regulated agents’ fees, but in practice it has become impossible to avoid agents, and they all charge one month’s rent plus 18% VAT — frequently without so much as a receipt.
Municipal bureaucracy. In Jerusalem at least, the bureaucratic burden of renting falls squarely on tenants: the obligation to update the Arnona registration, to remove your name from it when you leave. Jerusalem — which levies the highest Arnona in the country — does not even allow monthly payment, forcing tenants to front large sums for somebody else’s property and hope they will be reimbursed if the incoming landlord cooperates and sends a letter. This is an absurd situation.
Utilities. Every move means re-registering electricity, water, and gas from scratch.
The search itself. Finding a place to live requires weeks of viewings across a diminishing supply of overpriced, depressing apartments, many in barely habitable condition — weeks of unpaid time that takes you away from work. My wife and I are both small business owners; between the war and the rental process, we lost income we will never recover.
Legal costs. It remains routine for landlords to present tenants with contracts that purport to strip them of their legal rights and demand signatures on illegal provisions. The cost of having those contracts reviewed by lawyers — which my wife and I have borne repeatedly — comes out of the tenant’s pocket.

When we sought help during the crisis, legal-aid clinics took weeks to return a phone call. One municipal worker told us that God will help us, and that we were exaggerating when we described what the move would cost. Trying to explain the reality to someone who has never encountered this rental market is like being told to just walk to the moon.

The law that was supposed to fix this

The Knesset tried. The Fair Rental Law of 2017 was supposed to introduce even simple baseline requirements. To say that this legislation has been a failure is an understatement:

Tenancy at will is still, in effect, completely legal.
Enforcement mechanisms against landlords who ignore repair obligations exist on paper, but accessing the court system — in a country of immigrants, with an acute language asymmetry layered on top of an already vulnerable landlord–tenant power dynamic — is anything but simple.
Whatever meager protections the law was supposed to achieve have amounted to essentially zero on the ground.

Ask any Israeli property lawyer who deals with tenancy disputes and they will tell you that the slumlord is, sadly, the norm and not the exception. The system does nothing to prevent serial slumlords from acting with near-total impunity, relying on the fact that tenants either don’t know their rights or are too exhausted to defend them.

What this does to people

In ten years of renting, I have watched tenant exploitation get steadily worse. My wife and I have always paid our rent on time. We have acted as unpaid caretakers for the investment properties of people who don’t live here, undertaking repairs to their property. In return — for paying off successive strangers’ mortgages — all we have received is a roof over our heads that can be taken away for no reason, on notice.

Each forced move has been not only a massive financial blow that makes saving for a down payment feel like an impossible undertaking; it has rattled our sense of belonging and permanence. How can you ever feel settled and established? How can you feel like a contributor to the Zionist vision when your very shelter is permanently at risk of arbitrary termination?

Other countries have instituted far better protections. Israel’s tenancy landscape, by contrast, is a completely unregulated Wild West — and one only needs to start sharing stories with friends to discover how widespread tenant exploitation is.

The inequity of Jerusalem and other Israeli cities pursuing a housing boom of investment property that residents largely cannot afford to buy into, while simultaneously neglecting a rental crisis that is robbing young people of dignity, stable housing, and any path onto the property ladder, cannot be overstated.

This must be a central plank of any serious political platform.