Political Deadlock and Pandemic Show the Weakness of Israel’s Cabinet Ministers

In Israel, the ministers who form the executive branch are elected members of the Knesset. They obtain their positions as part of the horse-trading process that goes into forming a governing coalition. For instance, the outgoing health minister Yaakov Litzman, who received much criticism for his handling of the COVID-19 outbreak, was appointed not because of any special expertise or interest in public health, but because he demanded the post in exchange for bringing his United Torah Judaism party into the coalition.

Underneath each minister is a director general, usually a career civil servant, who often does much to shape and implement policy. Haviv Rettig Gur explains how recent events have demonstrated both the weaknesses and the strengths of this system:

The Israeli right often complains about the country’s “governability” problem—the way elected leaders often find themselves straitjacketed by over-powerful (and leftist, the complaint goes) bureaucrats and unable to enact right-wing policies. It’s a constant refrain that even played a central part in Likud’s 2015 election campaign.

But the coronavirus crisis and the past year and a half of political deadlock, from the fall of the 34th government in December 2018 to the formation of the 35th on May 17, 2020, have led some, including on the right, to rethink the sources of the problem. Whether it was the health minister, then-Finance Minister Moshe Kaḥlon, the absentee agriculture minister (a position held by four different people since November), or any number of other vital cabinet posts, the unprecedented events of the past eighteen months have showcased for Israelis the fecklessness and irresponsibility of much of their elected leadership and the importance of the technocrats really running the show behind the scenes.

The ministers Israelis needed most were busy avoiding the hard decisions and responsibilities in the midst of a dire national emergency—and it was the much-maligned bureaucrats who stepped quietly into the breach and delivered coherent policies to deal with the crisis.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Coronavirus, Israeli politics

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF