What a Year of War Costs a Working Artist

In a year when the bookings stop, one conclusion is very easy to reach on your own: the touch is gone, the price is too high, or there was never a real profession here to begin with. That conclusion sounds responsible. It is phrased in the language of taking ownership, which is why it feels like integrity rather than a misdiagnosis. The question it skips over is simpler. What actually happened this year to the market where this work gets sold, and how much of the fall belongs to the person counting it.

There is a documented record. It is incomplete, and some of it does not touch the exact field these lines are being read from, but it exists and it can be checked.

The number someone already bothered to count

Eshkolot, the Israeli organization representing singers, actors, comedians, and dubbing artists, set up a fund in 2022 for artists in financial difficulty. According to the organization's own figures, reported by Yedioth Ahronoth, in 2022 the fund received between two and ten aid requests a month. In June 2025 it received 111 requests in a single month. Along the way there was a rise of roughly 60 percent in 2023, the year the war broke out, and another roughly 60 percent in 2025, and about half of the applicants were under the age of 50 [1].

One detail in that report is worth more than all its numbers. The whole process is handled discreetly and applicants' names are kept secret, to make it easier for artists to apply at all. "There are artists who are ashamed," says a well-known singer quoted there who is helping a struggling colleague. "They used to be successful, and suddenly they need money to feed the family." Eshkolot's CEO, Uri Rashtik, adds that an artist may apply for a grant of up to 20,000 shekels, but the fund's budget is limited and it currently struggles to distribute more than 3,000 shekels per request [1].

Which is to say: the private conclusion that this is a personal failure is common enough that an entire organization built a confidentiality procedure around it.

The background this number sits inside

The Eshkolot figure is not an outlier in the wider economy. A survey by the Israel Democracy Institute, conducted among 1,236 respondents by Daphna Aviram-Nitzan and Omer Cohen, found that 54 percent of self-employed workers in Israel reported a decline of around 50 percent in their business activity because of the war, a sharper hit than salaried workers reported. The same survey flagged the self-employed as one of the population groups requiring particular attention, alongside Arab Israelis and the non-profit sector [2].

And at the level of the whole economy, so these figures are not read in a vacuum: the Taub Center, in a report by Prof. Benjamin Bental and Dr. Labib Shami published in December 2024, shows that GDP fell in the last quarter of 2023 at an annual rate of 4.1 percent, a smaller drop than the 8 percent fall in the second quarter of 2020, the first quarter of the Covid crisis. The same report estimates military expenditure and reconstruction costs in the early stages of the war at roughly 250 billion shekels, about 13 percent of GDP [3]. That comparison matters to anyone who lived through both periods. In terms of overall output this fall was the more measured of the two, and yet inside the culture sector the picture looks different.

How the money disappears, not only how much

"The market is bad" is a diagnosis you can do nothing with. What you can do something with is the mechanism. A July 2026 piece by Barry Davis in The Jerusalem Post builds it out of people speaking on the record under their own names.

Yossi Singer, head of the Israeli Artists' Association, notes that the sum set aside for supporting culture in Israel comes to 0.18 percent of the state budget, probably the lowest share of any OECD country, where public spending on culture averages 1.2 percent of government expenditure. Adi Sha'al, cofounder of the Vertigo Dance Company, gives that figure a timeline: "For years it was 0.25 percent of the national budget, now it is down to 0.18." Singer adds a number worth holding next to every small private one: by his account, over 250,000 households in Israel live off the field of the arts, production, lighting, and sound included [4].

And here is what that looks like in practice. Vertigo, whose municipal and state funding covers 45 percent of its outgoings, lost half of the income it generates itself, the half that came from performing abroad. "That is gone. They tell us they don't like us, or they don't like us and don't say anything," Sha'al says. Tania Coen-Uzzielli, director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, describes getting 45 percent from the municipality and 5 percent or less from the Ministry of Culture, and adds: "We can't bring exhibitions from abroad because everyone boycotts us," and then "you have to close the museum and store all the artworks away because there's a war going on" [4]. That account was checked against a second source and holds: a March 2026 piece by Talia Banon Tsur in Haaretz reports that on the morning of February 28, as the first sirens of the second Iran war sounded, museum staff arrived and took entire exhibitions that had been hung only recently down to the protected storage area [5].

And the detail that speaks directly to anyone who works booking by booking. Noam Kuzar and Lidia Maletin, founders of Bar-Kayma in Jerusalem, support some 60 Jerusalem bands and artists. Kuzar notes that the municipality has not yet finalized its 2026 budget, and asks how an artist is supposed to plan ahead without knowing whether there will be any funding for their projects. Maletin supplies the consequence: "That's why you get so many festivals and events in October, November and December. That's because the budget is finally decided on and there are funds to spend" [4].

That is a large part of the explanation for the holes in a freelancer's calendar, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the work. Whoever decides when there will be a budget also decides when there will be work.

And one figure that lands exactly in the season event artists work: Israel's biggest Purim street parties were shut down in 2026 by the war with Iran, and people celebrated instead in bomb shelters and at smaller gatherings [6]. Purim is peak season for anyone who draws at events. A year in which it did not happen on the street is not a year in which the bookings dried up because of the portfolio.

What the sources do not say

The picture is not uniform, and that is worth stating plainly. In that same article, Effie Benaya, CEO of Confederation House, says the funding he receives from the Jerusalem Municipality, the Culture and Sports Ministry, and the Jerusalem Foundation held steady, and that he is happy with it [4]. Anyone whose year passed quietly is not imagining that, and a uniform collapse is not what the sources describe.

And here is this article's boundary. A search made for it across three different angles, in Hebrew and in English, over two research days, did not find a single documented account of the income of an event caricaturist or of a visual artist working events during these years. Everything above concerns performing artists, dance, theatre, museums, or the self-employed in general [1][2][4]. Anyone doing precisely that work will not find one person in the press who was asked about their year. That absence is not proof that nothing happened, and it is not evidence that something did. It is exactly what it is: a field nobody measured.

On the aid side too the picture is less generous than an initial search suggests. The Culture and Sports Ministry's call for assistance to artists in economic distress, in the round that closed on December 7, 2025, is open to citizens and residents of Israel aged 60 and over, with at least 15 years of standing in one of the fields of music, theatre and fringe, dance, film, or literature, and an average monthly income of no more than 8,000 shekels. The maximum grant is 15,000 shekels [7]. Visual artists do not appear in the list of fields at all, and the text of the call makes no mention of the war: this is a standing annual programme and not emergency relief. The one public aid scheme that surfaces under the heading of artists in distress is not meant for this field and was not built in response to these years.

What one caricaturist did say about working inside a war

The closest voice found is that of Amos Biderman, Haaretz's political caricaturist for 25 years, in a February 2024 piece by Ido David Cohen. It is a different profession from drawing live portraits at events, and the difference is worth keeping visible: Biderman draws daily political caricature for a newspaper. What carries across between the two is narrower, and more trustworthy for being so. "There is no difference between a caricaturist's role in war and in normal times," he says there, and then describes what did change: "In the first days after October 7 there was great restraint because the whole country was in trauma." The loud, colourful figures he would normally draw fell silent or waited, frightened, under the table, which is how he drew the government in his first caricature of the war. By February 8 that had shifted, and he was drawing government ministers in a locked psychiatric ward [8].

What this offers is not evidence about income. It is evidence about the hand: what it is willing to draw, and when. That is part of the cost too, and it appears in no table.

What the record settles, and what stays open

What can be closed after all this is narrow, and still worth having. The fall in income across the culture sector in these years is documented, was measured by a body that represents artists, and shows up at the level of the economy as well [1][2][3]. The mechanism producing it is known by name: a public budget that shrank, a boycott that closed off performing abroad, incoming tourism that vanished, a calendar set by when a budget gets approved, and an entire season that did not take place on the street [4][6]. One year like that is not an opinion on your portfolio.

And what stays open has to be said without wrapping. Knowing it was the year and not the hand does not pay rent. The aid that exists is small, and part of it is not open to this field at all [1][7]. Nobody has measured the field of visual event artists, so there is no evidence-based recommendation here about what to do next year. What there is, is one distinction, and it does change what you do next: anyone who reads a fall like this as a verdict on their ability is making decisions on the basis of a wrong figure.

And when it comes to working on what is actually within your control, building a portfolio is work of editing, documentation, and order, and it is not a measure of success in any one year's market.

CTA: A short conversation is enough to know if this is the right path.

Sources

[1] Raz Shchanik, A jump in the number of artists in financial difficulty seeking help, ynet. Eshkolot's own figures: the volume of aid requests, the grant ceiling, and the confidentiality around applying.

[2] Raquel Guertzenstein Frohlich, War results in 50% business decline for Israel's self-employed, survey finds, The Jerusalem Post. The sample size, the share of self-employed reporting a decline, and the groups the survey flagged.

[3] Benjamin Bental, Labib Shami, Israel's Economy 2024: A Nation at War, Taub Center. The macroeconomic background: the fall in GDP, the comparison with Covid, and the cost estimates.

[4] Barry Davis, War, boycotts, and shrinking budgets push Israeli culture to the brink, The Jerusalem Post. Culture's share of the budget, Vertigo, the Tel Aviv Museum, Bar-Kayma, and Confederation House.

[5] Talia Banon Tsur, Can Israel's Culture Sector Survive the War?, Haaretz. Independent corroboration of the move of exhibitions into protected storage. Only the opening paragraph is readable without a subscription, and only that was used here.

[6] Avshalom Halutz, Purim in Israel Was Canceled Because of the Iran War. Or Was It?, Haaretz. The shutdown of the biggest Purim parties in 2026. Only the opening paragraph is readable without a subscription.

[7] Call for assistance to artists in economic distress 2025, Ministry of Culture and Sport, as published by the Israeli Directors Guild. The eligibility conditions, the fields included, and the grant ceiling.

[8] Ido David Cohen, How do you make caricature in days of cholera?, Haaretz. Amos Biderman on the caricaturist's role in wartime. Only the opening paragraph is readable without a subscription.