Analysis from Israel
Likud primary voters largely opted to reward legislative and ministerial achievement – as they should.
To all those pundits who have been bemoaning the primary losses of Likud’s “most respectable and presentable ministers,” as one put it, I’d like to pose one simple question: Can anyone point to anything substantive that Dan Meridor, Benny Begin and Michael Eitan actually accomplished during all their decades in the Knesset? A signature piece of legislation? An important ministerial policy?

Because offhand, I can’t – and I probably follow politics more closely than most voters. Yet I can easily list some substantive achievements for most of the younger politicians who beat them out on this year’s Likud slate.

Granted, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu reportedly values Begin and Meridor’s input at various ministerial forums, but you don’t need to be a minister to offer advice: Prime ministers routinely consult experts from outside the government. Additionally, the conduct of all three men indisputably lends dignity to the Knesset; considering the cringe-inducing behavior of many MKs, that isn’t nothing. But at some point, don’t voters have a right to demand more of their representatives than merely offering advice and avoiding embarrassment?

And in fact, they have. Take, for instance, MK Yariv Levin, whom many pundits like to malign as a foaming-at-the-mouth radical. In reality, Levin, who placed ninth in the primary, is one of the Knesset’s most serious and effective legislators. One of his signature accomplishments of the last term was pushing through a law requiring any cession of sovereign Israeli territory to be approved by either a two-thirds Knesset majority or a referendum. I’ve explained elsewhere why I think this law is vitally important. But the legislative skill and tenacity required to pass it were equally noteworthy.

After all, it’s no great achievement to pass a law of the “let’s throw money at widows/orphans/stray cats” variety; those laws enjoy automatic bipartisan majorities. Pushing through a controversial piece of legislation opposed by successive prime ministers is a very different matter. It took Levin years, and he suffered repeated defeats. But instead of giving up, he did what serious legislators do: patiently recruited supporters, made changes to assuage his colleagues’ concerns, and eventually succeeded. The Knesset has far too few legislators of this caliber.

Indeed, the contrast with Eitan couldn’t be starker. Eitan (to his credit) is one of Likud’s earliest and most articulate critics of both judicial activism and the judicial appointments process. So why do the same leftists who denounce Levin as a dangerous opponent of the Supreme Court now laud Eitan as a court supporter? Because Eitan never did anything but talk, so court supporters have correctly concluded that he’s no threat. Levin, in contrast, has proposed a serious bill to reform the judicial appointments process. I’ve explained previously why (contrary to The Jerusalem Post’s editorialist), I strongly support this bill. More importantly, however, his record shows that he won’t give up just because Netanyahu quashed it once. That makes him a real threat to supporters of the status quo.

But given a choice between an MK who’s just hot air and one who seriously tries to solve problems via legislation, shouldn’t we prefer the latter?   

Nor is Levin alone. For another example, take Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who placed first in the primary: In one short term, he’s pushed through numerous reforms that experts have advocated for years. He persuaded the high school teachers’ union to sign onto a program (launched by his predecessors) that offers higher pay in exchange for increased classroom hours; he boosted funding for higher education after years of cuts; he launched the “centers of excellence” program to lure talented Israeli academics working overseas back home.

It’s too early to tell how successful these moves will be; most have only just begun to be implemented. But one more modest initiative has already borne welcome fruit: Sa’ar succeeded in more than doubling the number of schoolchildren visiting Jerusalem, our capital city and a cradle of Jewish history. If you believe, as I do, that it’s important both for children to see their capital and to learn about their nation’s history, this alone would constitute a signal achievement.

Or take Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz, who placed fourth in the primary. I confess I’m not unbiased here; I benefit from Katz’s tenure every time I drive to Jerusalem: A badly deteriorating highway has been repaved, and a particularly dangerous stretch where accidents used to occur routinely now has a crash barrier. But it seems I’m not the only one: A recent survey by the Federation of Israeli Chambers of Commerce found that businessmen rated Katz’s ministry as the easiest government agency to do business with, by a substantial margin. The Transportation Ministry scored 7.36 out of 10; the runner-up scored 6.899.

As the survey noted, Katz didn’t inherit this status; his ministry’s first-place finish is due to a sustained effort to reduce red tape that has led it to improve its score in each of the last three quarters. Isn’t that precisely the kind of ministerial competence we ought to be rewarding?

Granted, there are a few unfortunate exceptions to this rosy picture, which is why there are only two cheers in the title of this piece. Miri Regev and Tzachi Hanegbi, for instance, both finished in the top 20 despite being high on my list of people nobody should tolerate in their parliament. The former is a cheap demagogue and serial incompetent (just compare the PR disaster of the Second Lebanon War, when she headed the IDF Spokesman’s Office, to the army’s much more successful PR efforts during the recent Gaza operation). The latter is a corrupt opportunist who jumped from Likud to Kadima in 2006 because it would clearly be the ruling party and has now returned to Likud for the same reason, but still has fans due to his history of providing “jobs for the boys” (ironically, Hanegbi is also beloved of leftist pundits, due to his opportunistic “moderation”).

Overall, however, primary voters opted to reward achievement and punish its absence. Which just goes to show, once again, that voters often have more sense than the pundits who decry them.

The writer is a journalist and commentator.

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Why Israel Needs a Better Political Class

Note: This piece is a response to an essay by Haviv Rettig Gur, which can be found here

Israel’s current political crisis exemplifies the maxim that hard cases make bad law. This case is desperate. Six months after the coronavirus erupted and nine months after the fiscal year began, Israel still lacks both a functioning contact-tracing system and an approved 2020 budget, mainly because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more worried about politics than the domestic problems that Israel now confronts. The government’s failure to perform these basic tasks obviously invites the conclusion that civil servants’ far-reaching powers must not only be preserved, but perhaps even increased.

This would be the wrong conclusion. Bureaucrats, especially when they have great power, are vulnerable to the same ills as elected politicians. But unlike politicians, they are completely unaccountable to the public.

That doesn’t mean Haviv Rettig Gur is wrong to deem them indispensable. They provide institutional memory, flesh out elected officials’ policies, and supply information the politicians may not know and options they may not have considered. Yet the current crisis shows in several ways why they neither can nor should substitute for elected politicians.

First, bureaucrats are no less prone to poor judgment than politicians. As evidence, consider Siegal Sadetzki, part of the Netanyahu-led triumvirate that ran Israel’s initial response to the coronavirus. It’s unsurprising that Gur never mentioned Sadetzki even as he lauded the triumvirate’s third member, former Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov; she and her fellow Health Ministry staffers are a major reason why Israel still lacks a functional test-and-trace system.

Sadetzki, an epidemiologist, was the ministry’s director of public-health services and the only member of the triumvirate with professional expertise in epidemics (Bar Siman-Tov is an economist). As such, her input was crucial. Yet she adamantly opposed expanding virus testing, even publicly asserting that “Too much testing will increase complacence.” She opposed letting organizations outside the public-health system do lab work for coronavirus tests, even though the system was overwhelmed. She opposed sewage monitoring to track the spread of the virus. And on, and on.

Moreover, even after acknowledging that test-and-trace was necessary, ministry bureaucrats insisted for months that their ministry do the tracing despite its glaringly inadequate manpower. Only in August was the job finally given to the army, which does have the requisite personnel. And the system still isn’t fully operational.

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