Projects
Capital from the sale of the bonds are designated by Israel's Finance Ministry for economic development projects, many of which were essential to solidifying Israel's post-independence economy. They included:
- The National Water Carrier, which irrigated nearly half a million acres (4,000 km²), allowing Israel to become agriculturally self-sufficient;
- The Dead Sea Works, which extracted potash and bromine and became Israel's first major industrial complex;
- Port development and expansion in Ashdod, Haifa, and Eilat, opening up export gateways to Europe, Asia, and Africa; and
- The Hadera power plant, which helped alleviate Israel's lack of energy resources.
More recently, capital raised through the sale of the bonds has been used for undertakings such as:
- The building of homes and creation of jobs for hundreds of thousands of Jews who made aliyah from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia during the massive wave of immigration throughout the 1990s;
- Ben-Gurion International Airport expansion;
- Extending Israel's rail network;
- Improving the national highway system;
- Enabling national infrastructure; and
- Desalination plants.
Israel bonds will also help fund development of the Negev desert, Israel's largest remaining open area, comprising approximately half the country's land mass. In addition, plans are underway for industrial parks in the Galilee to further expand Israel's hi-tech sector.
Read more about this topic: State Of Israel Bonds
Famous quotes containing the word projects:
“But look what we have built ... low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.... Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums.... Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“One of the things that is most striking about the young generation is that they never talk about their own futures, there are no futures for this generation, not any of them and so naturally they never think of them. It is very striking, they do not live in the present they just live, as well as they can, and they do not plan. It is extraordinary that whole populations have no projects for a future, none at all.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)