Look at the Budget. Better Yet, Don't

May 22, 2009

Although all of the attention this week was focused on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, where issues of Israel’s needs and responsibilities to assure its security were the topic, the most vexing question about survival may be an internal domestic one. The budget that was cobbled together with the help of all six parties in the ruling coalition and 30 ministers, inevitably fell victim to narrow, self-interested political trade-offs. As Nehemia Shtrasler describes in Haaretz, the budget is seriously flawed, probably fatally so. Efforts to control the growth in government were rejected. Efforts to diminish the inefficiencies arising from the rigidity labor unions were rejected. Efforts And on and on. The “ruling” coalition in actuality cannot exert ruling power. A column by Jeremy Gillick in the recent issue of Moment begins by discussing Ben Gurion’s disappointment at his failure to establish an effective electoral process.

The electoral process aroused in Ben-Gurion more anger and annoyance than any other institution he took part in creating. “In our electoral system,” he said in 1954, “the citizen has no right to choose his representatives. The candidates are selected not by the voter but by a central party committee. Our ballot system is a farce and worse, it is an abuse of democracy.” Four years later, in a speech to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, he contended that the country employed a “bad democratic system” whose electoral procedures were “rotten and destructive.” His words were prophetic…

To get back to security, Netanyahu or any other prime minister, is incapable of ruling, when coalitions are so fragile that they can split apart when one or two members withdraw over a narrow political interest. Netanyahu could exert actual leadership by taking a stand that he believed reflected a broad consensus of Israelis, risk splintering his coalition, and then hope that a reconstituted Knesset would have the votes to support those policies. It does not seem likely to happen soon.