This paper takes the old-age pension system in Israel as a test case to examine the implications of proposals for pension reform now being debated or implemented in many welfare states. For over a decade, high on the agenda of decision-makers on both national and international levels, there has been the notion of moving towards a changing ‘partnership in pensions’ or, to put it more bluntly, towards greater privatisation of social security. Virtually since its emergence in the 1950s, the Israeli old-age pension has been based primarily upon a mix of low universal state pensions and income-related private occupational pensions. This paper compares the British and Israeli social security systems for older people in the wake of the reforms recently introduced in Britain and analyses the implications of the Israeli structure on the distribution of social security spending and on the wellbeing of different categories of older individuals.