On TV Tax, or how I bought Sarit Hadad's new CD

A few days ago I received a bill for the TV tax. Here in Israel if you own a TV, whether you watch it or not, you have to pay a tax that goes to support public channels. I guess that’s one of those things that Israel decided to copy from Europe.

I tried calling the tax people to tell them that I don’t own a TV, but they conveniently don’t pick up the phone. Instead there is a really long recording in many languages that tells you how to pay it automatically over the phone and what will happen to you if you don’t pay (i.e. how the government will take away everything you own and put you in prison, yada yada yada), but nothing about those who don’t own a TV.

So after a few days of futile calls I decided to pay them a visit. I walk into the TV tax office in Jerusalem and it’s this small room with 3 clerks sitting there and no customers. I walk over to one of the clerks and tell him that I got a bill for the TV tax but I don’t own a TV and therefore they should mark in their computer that I don’t need to pay. He takes the bill from me and asks me, “Can you read?”. “Yes”. “What does this say?” I say, “It says that you only have to pay if you own a TV. But how do you know that I don’t own a TV? Don’t you need to mark it down?” He says, “If you buy a TV you have to tell us, and the store from which you buy it from has to tell us as well, by law.” And then he takes the bill, rips it into a gazillion pieces and throws it into the garbage can under his desk. My jaw drops. He says to me, “Don’t worry about it. Bye.”

Well at least Rehov Shamai has lots of nice music stores, so to justify the 15 shekels that I paid for parking, I walked into one of them and bought me Sarit Hadad’s new CD.

And that was my visit to the TV tax office.