At a Dec. 19 meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and high-ranking cabinet ministers, management of Teva Pharmaceuticals, the world’s largest generic drugmaker and Israel’s national champion, declined to back away from parts of a major restructuring scheme that will see the loss of thousands of jobs worldwide, including an estimated 1,750 in Israel.

Since last week’s announcement of the wide-sweeping job reduction scheme, some Israeli politicians had called on the company to close plants elsewhere, in particular in Ireland, pointing to the more than $6 billion in tax deductions and benefits they said Teva had received over the past decade.

Cabinet members attending the meeting, including Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon and Economy Minister Eli Cohen, had urged the drugmaker’s new CEO Kare Schultz to at least save a plant in Jerusalem that employs an estimated 870 people and is scheduled to close at the end of 2019.

Schultz said “all the measures in the restructuring plan are aimed at achieving our shared aspiration to sustain Teva as a strong global company, managed out of and based in Israel.” Without “drastic” steps, the company “will be increasingly vulnerable to potential takeover,” he said.

The point of the restructuring action, the CEO added, is to close unprofitable operations. For example, he said, the tablets currently produced in Jerusalem can be made at a third of the price in eastern Europe. At the same time, he promised that more attention will be devoted to high-level R&D inside the country. Teva has also pledged to work with the government to train redundant workers for new jobs.

Initially, it had been speculated that the Teva Tech plant in Israel’s southern Negev desert, which produces raw materials for the pharmaceutical industry, was up for sale. But Schultz told an Israeli newspaper that there were no plans affecting that company.

Both before and after the high-level meeting in Jerusalem, Israel’s labor unions, flanked by the families of workers whose jobs are being axed, gathered to protest the company’s decision, at the same time urging the government not to “capitulate to the dictates of Teva’s CEO” and to swiftly enact legislation making investment incentives for companies contingent on job guarantees.

In protest of the proposed job cuts, labor federation Histadrut organized a half-day nationwide strike on Dec. 17, briefly shutting down the Ben-Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, along with the stock exchange based in the city and government ministries in Jerusalem. A walkout by Teva workers idled the company’s Israeli operations again on Dec. 18 and Dec.19.

Alongside the discussions in Israel, Kaelan Hollon, Teva’s senior director of communications based in Washington, DC, told a pharmaceutical journal that the company’s seven US offices will be merged into one at an undetermined location. But he said the office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has already been closed and the offices in Horsham, Pennsylvania, and New York City, in addition to Washington, are in the process of closing.

The Israeli drugmaker is struggling under a $35 billion debt burden, much of it incurred in the ill-timed acquisition of Allergan that coincided with falling generics prices. The restructuring scheme is aimed at achieving cost savings of $3 billion annually by the end of 2019.