This analysis of the emerging pattern of Israel’s political institutions is the second of three articles which HAL LEHRMAN is writing for this magazine from Tel Aviv. The first, “The Economic Test Facing Israel,” appeared in the June issue.
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Tel Aviv
In a moving-picture theater called Kessem (“Magic”), where once Tom Mix, Gene Autry, and other quickshooting emissaries from the Wild West instructed the younger cowpunchers of Tel Aviv in the art of beating the rustlers to the draw, the Parliament of Israel is in session. Where once gimlet-eyed William S. Hart stalked across the wall, a patriarchal portrait of Theodor Herzl now presides over the deliberations of Zion. The hall has been transformed into a symphony of soft tone and quiet line. The Great Seal of Israel, a Menorah flanked by olive branches, adorns the raised tribune. A majestic, pearl-gray curtain sweeps down as a pleated backdrop behind the desks of the speaker and parliamentary officials, while overhead a procession of twelve stately shields, representing the months of the Hebrew year, marches across the cream-colored ceiling. Below, on four tiers of sleek leather benches grouped on mounting levels, and in a horseshoe design around the government table, are massed the one hundred and twenty members of the Knesset, first Assembly of Israel in nearly two millennia. Today this chamber is as handsome and dignified as that of any congress or parliament throughout the world.
Next door stands the former Hotel San Remo, remodeled to match the functional style of the Knesset and connected with it to form a single structure. Upstairs, meeting rooms are reserved for parliamentary groups, but much of the essential negotiation is transacted in a ground-floor self-service cafe, where members, their associates, and the press may enjoy the best salami and pickled herring in the Middle East. Contrary to Biblical promise, this is a land not of milk and honey but of tea and lemon. Lying in wait on the Mediterranean promenade outside are bands of Tel Aviv small fry, who descend with loud cries and autograph books on anyone—even the blue-uniformed, gold-buttoned ushers and the furtive journalists—emerging from the Knesset courtyard. Tel Aviv’s bright-eyed little boys and girls, too young to have fought for the state and still too young to help build it, feel they must have a tangible memento of these epochal times, a signature of some Patrick Henry or Judas Maccabeus with which they can garnish the heroic tale for their grandchildren. Instinctively, they sense that every moment now is history.
The small fry are right. This is a vibrant and unforgettable hour to be in Israel. It is also an instructive hour. This is the time when the institutions of the future state, now groping in their infancy, are reaching toward shape and form. What is done today in Parliament, Cabinet, courts, police, civil service, and other organs of government is determining the maturity of tomorrow. It is too early to read the future clear and plain. But enough is evident for a partial assessment of tendencies, and it is certainly time for a brief preliminary report on some of Israel’s developing institutions in this first year of freedom.
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Not having leisure to consult the voters while armed Arabs were pouring across the boundaries a year ago last May, the Provisional Government scraped together a temporary Parliament from the membership of two delegations previously elected by Palestine Jewry. One was the “Elected Council” (Vaad Leumi) which had managed Jewish community affairs under the mandate; the other was the group chosen to represent Palestine in the World Zionist Congress. This miniature “State Council,” reinforced by spokesmen of parties which had not been in the above-mentioned bodies, served as Parliament by emergency government decree for nine months. It had the double purpose of preparing the constitutional elections and ratifying government acts post facto. Enjoying no legislative power, it nevertheless set up much procedural precedent, which the Knesset has been modifying with great caution, as if the tradition were centuries instead of months old.
The Knesset itself was the product of regular elections this January. Of 506,567 persons eligible, 440,080 voted and only 5,479 ballots were spoiled—a remarkable demonstration of political earnestness and literacy. The Knesset’s first meetings were held in February in Jerusalem, on the top floor of the Jewish Agency, where Chaim Weizmann was elected President of the Republic, a speaker and two deputy speakers were chosen from the three largest parties, and a “Transitional Law” defining procedure for creation of a Cabinet was enacted. There followed three weeks of horse-trading and swapping of ministerial portfolios among the four groups in the majority bloc. Then David Ben Gurion presented his Cabinet and its program to the reconvened Knesset in Tel Aviv in March, and Israel’s first constitutional government was duly sworn in.
Inevitably, the new Parliament was Continental in spirit and atmosphere, thanks to the system of multiple parties (twelve of them) imposed by the European origins of practically all of Israel’s major politicians. One characteristic modification of the European formula arose from the chronic unwillingness of Jewish parties to be labeled anything except liberal or leftist. In Jerusalem Menachem Beigin’s Herut (“Freedom”) party, legal version of the fiery nationalist Irgun Zvai Leumi, objected as a body to being seated on the extreme right wing of the House. The “Herutniks” established squatter’s rights directly behind the Marxist Mapam, a proximity which sparked warm exchanges throughout the solemn proceedings. This clash was avoided in Tel Aviv by ingenious invention of a left-to-right seating plan based on party strength. It places Ben Gurion’s moderately socialist Mapai on the extreme left, Herut just right of center next to the peaceful religious bloc. Nathan Friedman-Yellin, who was let out of jail by general amnesty after his election, is the lone deputy of that intense band of devotees once known as the Stem Gang. He sits all by himself—on the far right.
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Otherwise, the Knesset has been taking shape as a combination of British and Continental devices, mainly French, with Jewish refinements. Bills get three readings (British style), and are studied by one of nine commissions (French style). A cardinal point established in the first months of the Knesset’s existence is that the government, and not Parliament, has the big say in deciding what legislation is to be presented. Sovereignty resides in the Knesset, but, arguing that government responsibility in this formative period of reconstruction requires unity of leadership, Ben Gurion has been successfully fighting for the principle that it is up to the government to initiate legislation and up to the Knesset to accept or reject it. Nor have the commissions, as in some parliaments, made good a claim to act as supervisory inspectors over the work of ministries and bureaus. A commission, for the moment, reviews proposed legislation in its field and may suggest revisions, but it is the government which accepts the amendment, not the commission which imposes it. On the whole, parliamentary controls over the executive are still nebulous, particularly since Ben Gurion’s “Mapainiks” hold the strategic positions. There is, furthermore, a tendency to concentrate the effective discussion of bills in the commissions, where all parties are proportionately represented, rather then in Parliament itself. By the time any bill returns to the Knesset for final debate and vote, its content and its fate are pretty well determined.
All legislation, however, gets its first and then its last airing in the plenary Knesset, and Parliament has yielded no tittle of the jealous right to speak its mind. The earlier State Council, by a revolution unparalleled in Jewish annals since Bar Kochba, did agree to a general five-minute limit on orators. But when the Knesset first convened in Jerusalem, the wells of eloquence poured over. The rhetoric has been turgid ever since. The Jews having waited two thousand years to speak, their elected representatives seem unwilling to wait one minute longer. Half the House may be out in the café for strudel, but there is always some one in the tribune, explaining his vote, getting his little paragraph in the papers. Unfamiliar with his own strength as magnified by the public-address system, he frequently performs full-blast; on one occasion, when the presiding speaker pleaded for a little less yelling, the indignant member deafened the hall by roaring into the microphone: “Who’s yelling?”
In the main, however, both the chair, usually occupied by Speaker Josef Sprinzak, and the Knesset at large are steadily developing their efficiency and decorum. By a shrewd and novel rule of procedure, the House decides exactly how much debate any particular bill will have, and then each party gets its quota of time; a debater who exceeds his allotment does so at the expense of his own party. Orators still lard their arguments with literary quotations and windy digressions; they are inclined to temporize with the little electric light which blinks on the rostrum when time is up; members shout derisive remarks or stage impromptu debates from the floor; the chair argues and pleads and pounds the gavel. But everybody is learning. Acquisition of disciplined finesse takes time. As Sprinzak has said: “Was my father a speaker of a Knesset?”
I have seen older parliaments with less dignity. I have also seen parliaments where discipline is absolute, where bills revising the whole structure and history of a state are introduced, debated, and acclaimed, without a dissenting voice, in the space of half an hour. There is no such present danger in the Knesset. One might wish, however, for a little more flexibility within party ranks. Except for slight variations on minor issues, each party has been voting solidly and by obvious pre-arrangement. Though the same miraculous unanimity often occurs in Western parliaments, and there is the added excuse here of the national emergency, this does not necessarily make the practice good. Too much agreement can be just as disastrous to progress as too little.
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They say of Ben Gurion that he will refuse the crown of Israel only because he objects to being called David II. The little white-haired dynamo with the bald spot on top has been powering the country with his own inexhaustible energy. To his personal direction of the war is generally given the credit for the victory. Now that he has shifted over to command of the economic crisis, he will get the credit if that battle is won, too. But the penalty for this is over-centralization, more work than any one man can do, and a chronic bottleneck farther down along the line. Almost the same is true of Finance Minister Eliezer Kaplan and, to a lesser degree, of nearly all the other Cabinet members.
Gone are the good old Jewish Agency days when even a reporter, to say nothing of a heavy contributor to the UJA, could sit down with any high official for a long heart-to-heart talk. Today the official is a member of the government of Israel. He dashes about in a powerful limousine, the blue and white pennon of Zion flapping, an armed bodyguard at the wheel. His time is as severely rationed as butter. It is harder to get an interview with him than with the Pope, as this writer can testify from personal experience with the Pope. More important, the ministers are falling behind because they are trying to do too much. They spend interminable hours, for instance, at the government table in the Knesset, instead of having parliamentary undersecretaries to represent them. They also take personal part in the spun-out discussions of the various Knesset commissions. Meanwhile the problems of administration pile up. I have heard subordinates inside certain departments privately expressing doubt whether their chiefs any longer have time for organized work, let alone organized thinking. It may all be due to a shortage of competent personnel. But, whatever the cause, a more generous division of ministerial labor ought to be close to the top on the list of urgent reforms in Israel.
“B. G.,” as the Premier is affectionately called, runs his Cabinet like a schoolmaster. When the government’s Four-Year Development and Absorption Plan was ready, he had it printed up as a booklet which each minister was to carry around in his pocket, and as a large poster which each minister was to tack on his wall or under the glass top of his desk. “B.G.” also invited each minister to look at the Plan every morning and ask himself what he had already done and what he proposed to do that day to bring it closer to realization.
In theory, each minister enjoys wide discretionary rights, the powers of the mandate’s High Commissioner having been generally divided up among the different ministers and officially bestowed upon them by publication in the Provisional Government’s Official Gazette when the High Commissioner disappeared with the British troops. Any decision of a minister—including emergency regulations good for three months unless the Knesset annuls them—becomes valid as soon as it appears in the Gazette (now called Records). The catch is that copy for the Records, on its way to publication, goes through the Premier’s office, where it can be “detained.”
In practice, however, this does not seem yet to have happened, because no minister would think of taking any major action before consulting the Premier, or all his colleagues in plenary session, which normally takes place once a week. “B.G.” controls the agenda of these meetings, and may also call irregular meetings. But it must be said that he has submitted his own major projects to the agenda, too. Furthermore, Cabinet decisions are made by a simple majority, in which the Premier casts only one vote like everyone else. Mapai, his party, holds nine of the sixteen portfolios, of course. Nevertheless, “B.G.” has been outvoted on occasion, even on a matter which affected the shape of the frontiers. Once taken, a decision becomes the responsibility of every minister insofar as he may not vote against it in the Knesset. He may express his personal opinion of it in the Knesset only if a majority of the Cabinet specifically gives him this privilege. He may abstain from voting, however—unless a Cabinet majority decides he may not.
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These internal regulations are mainly borrowed from French and Swiss cabinet procedure. But the basic law now governing Israel is almost entirely on loan from the British. When the mandate boarded ship and departed, the Israeli Provisional Government took over intact the corpus of law that the British left behind—except for the restrictions on immigration and land transfer. Such inheritance is a normal emergency procedure of successor states. It may be a long time before Israel, antique nation of the Law, produces a fundamental law and a constitution of its own.
Several draft constitutions exist, the most publicized one being that of Dr. Leo Kohn, Israeli Foreign Ministry political advisor who is an expert on, of all things, the constitution of the Irish Free State. But the odds are that discussion and adoption will be indefinitely postponed. The question of the Knesset’s own status—whether it is merely a constituent assembly or a full-term parliament—is also being left tacitly in abeyance.
Why the delay? Because Ben Gurion and his coalition fear a disruptive debate on the fundamental structure of the state while Israel still faces the immediately crucial problems of a hostile Arab world, immigrant absorption, and economic recovery. Pro-government atheists and rabbis, for example, agree alike that it is better to have a minimum agreement now on chupah, chazer, and the relation of church and state, while Israel directs all its strength to the task of finding room for a million new citizens, than to rend the country apart by a Kulturkampf. The intention seems to be, therefore, to do as the British do, meeting each issue as it arises, muddling through from day to day instead of imposing a neat Constitution full-grown and confining on a rapidly expanding society. “That the British produced Ernest Bevin,” says Ben Gurion, “doesn’t mean everything else they do is bad.”
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While government and Parliament concentrate on current business, the Yishuv which danced in the streets when the mandate fell goes on living under the dispensations of the mandate’s law, which is an English and Turkish mixture. Criminal law, torts, and procedure are patterned after English common law, with colonial revisions. Corporation and commercial law rests on Britain’s “Companies Act of 1929.” (Last year England adopted a new act that improves upon the mandatory version; adoption of the modernized form in Israel has been avoided thus far because of its embarrassing political implications, but Israel may yet take it over.) The civil code is the old Turkish Mejelle, whose antiquity and rural flavor may be savored in its concern with such urgent matters as the sale of camels. Another anachronism is the Turkish land law, which prescribes different types of inheritance for urban and agricultural estates. Under it, most of the city of Tel Aviv, which was largely an undeveloped coastal strip in the days of Balfour, is still regarded as farm land. Of all the Turkish codes, only mortgage law is comparatively modern, dating from 1913 and patterned on French lines. A special institute in the Ministry of Justice is re-examining traditional Jewish law to determine the feasibility of creating a new set of legal codes infused with the Judaic spirit and yet relevant to the needs of a progressive modern society.
Trial by jury was unknown in mandated Palestine, nor were there elected judges, because of the obstacles to such Western luxuries in a non-homogeneous, mixed Arab-Jewish population. Although these difficulties still exist, if to a lesser degree, a reform is envisaged for the vague future. Meanwhile, verdicts are still exclusively rendered by judges nominated by the state to every tribunal, beginning with the magistrates’ courts for low crimes, misdemeanors, and petty civil suits, through the district courts of appeal, to the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, whose “Five Old Men” sit in final judgment on appeals or complaints and writs against public officials.
The power of the Jerusalem tribunal to nullify “unconstitutional” legislation, in the manner of the American Supreme Court, has not been delineated, especially since there is no Constitution, but it already has upset administrative decisions of the state. In each instance, the High Court has defended the rights of the individual against arbitrary government action—as in the case of an Arab notable in Jaffa who was deprived of some of his rights as a citizen while under military arrest, or in the case of police personnel who were dismissed for having allegedly been overly receptive to bribes during the mandatory regime. In the latter case, a strong though non-legal influence on the court’s decision was the fact that the policemen had been discharged just before Passover. This, the judges evidently thought—as did most of the population—was inhuman and outrageous.
The government itself has also succumbed at times to a Jewish bias toward mercy and mitzvahs. After first refusing a visa to the agile Sidney Stanley, the Immigration Ministry announced that since Stanley was now out of England and “cut off from his family and home . . . on the eve of Passover, the traditional festival of freedom,” the government would permit him in Israel as “an act of grace and mercy.” It will also be remembered that the opening of the Knesset was magnanimously marked by a sweeping amnesty for prisoners, political and criminal—a mitzvah which caused no small distress to the police, who quickly got most of the felons behind bars again for returning to their lives of crime within twenty-four hours after liberation.
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The police have encountered more difficult problems than nabbing amnestied burglars and pickpockets. Their toughest assignment has been to persuade the people of Israel to like and trust them. Under the mandate, policemen of British origin were habitually insolent and frequently brutal, behaving in colonial style toward the “natives.” Mandatory policemen of Jewish origin were naturally less obnoxious, but they too were unpopular because of their liking for baksheesh. It was the British administration’s deliberate policy to hold its Jewish civil servants to starvation wages. Most of the police took bribes hand over fist with the partial justification of being otherwise unable to keep alive. The Israeli police inherited a legacy of inbred public suspicion and antagonism.
The job of breaking this down was complicated by the fact that the new police are dressed exactly like the old. On departing, the British had taken care to destroy, or give away to the Arabs, all the equipment they were unable to take with them. But three months later, lo and behold, a British vessel suddenly turned up in Israeli waters and unloaded on the beach a vast quantity of supplies that the administration had ordered two years earlier. It seems that the supply agency, not having received the circular announcing the mandatory power’s evacuation of Palestine, but having received payment, stoutly fulfilled its part of the bargain by making full delivery with laudable British thoroughness. The shipment included some ten thousand police uniforms, boots, caps, and miscellaneous items. As a result there blossomed on the streets and highways of free Israel a multitude of constables wearing Jewish faces and speaking Hebrew but dressed in the blue image of the hated Palestine police. It has taken the public a long time to get used to the amazing sight.
But they have, and have even learned to forget old grudges. This miracle was partly achieved by a well-organized propaganda campaign in which the schools and the press helped. Even more effective was the behavior of the policemen. On orders from upstairs they were, and remain, probably the most polite and mild-mannered constables in the history of law. They were quite capable of flexing their muscles, but only as a last resort. Instead of tickets they spoke softly, gave gentle reprimands to traffic violators, later handed out summonses with embarrassed apologies. I have seen three Tel Aviv constables actually pleading with two bloodied street-brawlers to be good fellows and go home. No people on earth could resist such blandishments. Today the police of Israel have wiped out all identification between themselves and their predecessors.
It is also a pleasure to report that Israeli citizens do not have police identity cards, a device customary in too many European countries. The public has plenty of identity cards, it is true—for rations, for voting, for other civic processes—but no card which must be stamped, renewed at regular intervals, and fished out on demand to prove that one is innocent of sedition and authorized to be in the country. As a matter of fact, Israelis do not yet have any formal nationality, since a nationality law has still to be promulgated. For purposes of Israel’s first election last January, the right to vote was unreservedly given to every legally competent adult who had been in the country when a census was taken the previous November 8.
Thus far the technical question of nationality has hardly arisen except in cases of passports and exit visas for travel. (Appropriately, the first legal grant of Israeli citizenship was made to President Weizmann.) In the main, exit visas have been restricted until now to government officials, of whom, by the way, an extraordinary number for such a small country seem to be traveling abroad. The dry remark attributed to Weizmann (but probably wrongly)—”Join the Jewish Agency and see the world”—still holds good, with amendments. Ordinary Israelis who apply for exit visas must prove that their journey is in the public interest or justified on strong compassionate grounds. Even then, the applicant may not get his Visa—sometimes for the simple reason that the particular official in charge does not feel like giving it to him.
Now a free country at war customarily reduces foreign travel by its citizens to a minimum. Furthermore, a country that suffers from a shortage of foreign currency usually economizes by discouraging its citizens from taking money abroad. But it is also true that, once a formal decision regulates the conditions for the issuance of a visa and a citizen fulfills those conditions, application of the decision ought not to be left to the uncontrolled discretion of some self-important official. Yet this happens to be so in more than one case. Similar abuse of power occurs in other ministries and agencies of the new government. All this brings up the disturbing question of the Israeli civil service, its complexion, its behavior—a subject that needs closer review here.
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On The Eastern outskirts of Tel Aviv sits the governmental compound known as Ha’Kirya (“The City”). Once it was called Sarona, and served a German Christian colony from the time of the Kaiser’s Reich until World War II. The British then moved in and interned its residents as enemy aliens. Later the area was purchased by the Tel Aviv municipality and the Jewish National Fund. Sarona’s Germanic settlers, naturally, are long departed. (Workmen on the building that is eventually to become the Foreign Ministry unearthed a stock of Nazi pamphlets and literature in the basement, which afforded the occasion for a festive “burning of the books” in reverse.) The one-hundred-acre Kirya, its streets newly paved and named by the letters of the alphabet, is now the heart and center of Israel’s budding civil service.
One of the proudest possessions of Zeev Sharef, the government’s General Secretary, is a bookcase crammed with files of drafts and plans for the various Israeli ministries written long in advance of Israel’s freedom. Preparations to take over started in October 1947, when the Jewish Agency—a whole month before partition was voted at Lake Success—decided that the British really meant to get out. By February a complete blueprint of government was ready. Even before the mandate ended, the Israeli administration had begun functioning.
The new ministries were straight transformations of the bureaus of previously existing institutions. Thus, the Political Department of the Agency became the Foreign Ministry; the Social Welfare Department of the Vaad Leumi, executive body of the Palestine Jewish community, became the Ministry of Social Welfare; the Ministry of Health was pieced together from the Vaad Leumi and the mandate government. Every department had its budget planned on paper for the first year. Even the ex-Nazi villas at the Kirya were already allocated to the various ministries. Some of the high officials knew ahead of time which office in which house was awaiting them, and where the furniture stood ready for delivery.
Training for the great day had been going on quietly and anonymously for years. Just as Haganah and the Jewish Brigade had been preparing to become the core of the Israeli army some day, so many men at many obscure posts had been grooming themselves to become the core of the Israeli administration. I remember one of them who came to Turkey in 1943 with credentials as a foreign correspondent from the Yoman Gaathon—the mimeographed newspaper tacked on the wall of his kibbutz. This “reporter’s” real job was to buy ships and smuggle refugees out of the Nazi-occupied Balkans. Today he is the Israeli Minister to Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Young Walter Eytan, now Director-General of the Foreign Ministry, ran an informal school for diplomats in Jerusalem during the mandate. The present Israeli Consul General in Prague was a leader of the Jewish underground in wartime Hungary. The director of Lydda Airport is the Austrian ex-pilot who trained the first fliers of Haganah. Officials moved over from the Jewish Agency, the Histadrut labor federation, the Anglo-Palestine and other banks, and even from the Palestine administration—including several non-Jewish British technicians who, having behaved decently during the mandate and studied their Hebrew, have signed new contracts and settled down to long-term residence in Israel. There also were volunteers in the manner of our “dollar-a-year men,” putting aside private interest for a time in order to contribute their abilities to the launching of the state. Finally, many more desks being available than professional administrators to fill them, a lot of jobs were parceled out more or less on the basis of party affiliation and personal friendship.
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In The first fine, careless rapture of independence, this heterogeneous personnel threw itself into its work with considerable enthusiasm, devotion, and self-sacrifice. Everybody felt the eye of history upon him, and responded energetically to the challenge of the inspired moment. When the youth of Palmach, Haganah, and the far-flung settlements were going out to battle with puny Sten guns and home-made hand grenades, who could think of personal gain and private ambition? Hours were long, work endless, payment meager, but officials high and low gave the best that was in them.
This spirit of self-sacrifice seems now to be petering out. Civil servants are adjusting themselves to the reduced tempo and lesser inspiration of quieter times. There is nothing unnatural about this; it was foreseeable and even inevitable. However, outside observers are not therefore obliged to ignore abundant evidence that the reaction is going too far, that the administration of this young and promising state these past few months has been slipping fast into faults and frailties which older bureaucracies have taken centuries to cultivate.
With due allowance for numerous high-minded exceptions, the tendency is setting in among officials to regard one’s post as a private preserve rather than a public service. For certain minor places, rudimentary examinations are now beginning to be offered, but a system of standards for civil service appointments does not yet exist and most positions are still being filled by invitation, not by competition. In most cases, the invitation is political. Many of the ministries are heavily loaded with party comrades of the particular minister who held the portfolio when the department was being formed. In Social Welfare, bailiwick of the right-wing religious Agudath, almost every new appointee sports a yamulka. Labor has been packed with “Mapamniks” because that leftwing, pro-Soviet party controlled this ministry in the days of the Provisional Government. Trade and Industry has a large complement of General Zionists, and a half-dozen key ministries teem with stalwarts of Mapai, the dominant party in the present coalition. Especially where the party of the rank and file in a ministry is still the party of its chief, the inclination is to enjoy the benefits of a closed corporation or a private club. Power breeds arrogance, even in Israel. The customer on the other side of the rail—the ordinary, undistinguished, taxpaying civilian—is a suppliant who must be cleared out of the room somehow, not a client entitled to service.
The general incivility of the civil service has recently provoked a formal circular to all hands which reads in part: “Officials receiving the public should conduct business quietly and politely. They would do well to offer the visitor a seat before beginning conversation. If an application cannot be complied with, the fact should be stated, and at the same time the applicant should be guided as to what he must do next . . . .” Unfortunately, this praiseworthy advice passes over in silence a matter that is even more important to the civilian than routine courtesy: the defense of his rights against arbitrary decisions.
Such guarantees grow increasingly necessary as the functions of the administration expand. The new “austerity” controls, for one thing, will inexorably create a spider’s web of extra red tape, in the middle of which a regiment of officials will hand down edicts based on their own particular interpretations of the very complex law. They have the pleasant prospect of being able to abuse their power pretty widely before they run afoul of higher authority. In some spheres, they have no cause to feel that higher authority will ever interfere with them at all.
Take the case of the recent “compulsory loans,” for instance. Businessmen were arbitrarily tapped for specific contributions, with the unspoken understanding that if they failed to supply the cash or a good reason for not supplying the cash, they might trip over sudden obstacles later when applying for import licenses, bank credits, foreign exchange allocations, and other official services to which normally they would be entitled without discrimination. Again, instead of receiving compensation, owners of houses are being required to repair, at their own expense and to an amount prescribed by an official agency, the damage done to their property by military action of the enemy—and the Israeli forces.
Now this is not the place to examine the arguments that a compulsory loan is justified because the nation was giving its blood while businessmen were making profits, or that compulsory building-repair is justified because of the housing shortage. Nor is there room here to examine the implications of legislation which tends increasingly to put official hands into the middle-class private purse. We are examining the institutions that govern Israel, not the ideology that governs the regime. It need only be said that measures which require a big control apparatus for their enforcement open a vast field for haphazard rulings and carefree action by officials who largely lack competent training and a mature tradition of public service.
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Many underprivileged citizens are complaining, however, that another kind of tradition does in fact already exist. This might be described as a re-writing of Sam Gompers: “Let us reward those we know and punish those we don’t know.” The local one-word version of this, imported from Eastern Europe, is “protektzia,” It is the word on everybody’s lips, as virulent as an eleventh Egyptian plague. It is otherwise known as “Vitamin P”—and every Israeli, except those with comfortable jobs or obliging friends in the government, will tell you it is one vitamin of which this country is suffering a strong over-dose.
“Protektzia” is for the new Israel what baksheesh was for the old Palestine. Way back in the misty days of the mandate, you could get everything for money and nothing without it. From driver’s license to government appointment, from lowly clerk to lordly official, everything and pretty nearly everybody had his price. This omnipotent baksheesh, with subtle British colonial modifications in Palestine, is a rite still piously observed in the rest of the Middle East and in large parts of the Balkans. In Israel, baksheesh has virtually ceased to exist. It is considered most unpatriotic, and anti-social. But “protektzia” has triumphantly taken its place.
“Protektzia” does not involve anything so vulgar as money. It involves influence. It requires that the applicant for an official job, or an official favor, or even for a normal official service, should know somebody in a position to do him good. You need to have a friend, or a friend of a friend, someone with whom you went to school, or knew in Haganah, or someone in Mapai or Mizrachi or whatever party organization happens to be running the bureau that gives out the thing you want. With that connection you are all set—without it, no matter how good your claim, you wait, you rush around in circles, and you may end exhausted and unrequited. Many unfortunates who minded their own business all their lives and stayed out of politics now look back with poignant longing to the baksheesh era. At least, they say, money was a thing you could collect and hand over, but friends in strategic places are things you either have or don’t have, and if you don’t have them you’re through.
“Protektzia” is indeed a wonderful thing.
I know one hard-working local journalist who has been living with his wife and child in his in-laws’ small flat because of the housing shortage. Also in the flat are his sister and several of his wife’s assorted relatives. Now my friend, by glorious accident, happens to have some shares in a certain apartment house. Recently a tenant in that house prepared to move out. Under the law, an owner without lodging of his own has first claim on any vacant part of his rented property. My friend happily prepared to move in.
But he found an official of the Prime Ministry ahead of him. (This deft operation is called “requisition.”) It seems that the official already had a two-room apartment, but for his wife—who, incidentally, was secretary to a Cabinet member—it wasn’t big enough . . . . My friend’s only recourse now is to wend his apoplectic way to Jerusalem and lay his burden before the High Court. When last seen, he was disappearing in the direction of the Holy City.
The truth is that the bureaucracy of Israel suffers from a curiously split personality. Its Western ideas are acquired; its Eastern habits are innate. The two are in constant clash. Officials who come from Western Europe, Britain, or America are few and completely outnumbered. Worse, those who come from Central and Eastern Europe or are Palestine-born actually believe they are Western-minded. Some of them certainly are. But a good many others are not. What they have learned are the slogans of the West, the clichés of democracy, not its meaning. The outcome of this undecided struggle between form and substance will write itself large in the structure and spirit of the future Israel.
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It is never agreeable to pick flaws in the things we love, and it is frequently thankless. One comes to Israel with eagerness and enthusiasm. One expects to find inadequacies and imperfections. Perfection does not exist anywhere else. Why should it exist in Israel? But what should a reporter do about the faults that do exist? I think he should do his job—and report them. There are faults that can’t be helped because they are due to conditions and pressures beyond control. These should be reported and explained so that the distant reader will understand them and sympathize with the men who have to deal with them. And there are other faults that arise not out of circumstances but out of men and their errors and their weaknesses. I think these should be reported too. If the first reporter doesn’t, the second one will, perhaps with more venom and less charity. When the truth finally comes out, as it must, those who have been misinformed will not be grateful to the purveyors of fables.
There is another reason for telling the whole truth cleanly. Israel is new. Israel is malleable, like a little child with soft and delicate bones. The evils of older states are the accretion of age, the slow hardening of youthful tendencies into ancient ritual. There is still time in Israel. But in Israel the bad, like the good, is aging quickly. The men who are supervising its growth have brought with them the habits and the sophistications of the societies from which they came. They are in a hurry because there is so much to do. And everything they do creates a precedent, lays down a rule for tomorrow. If suggestions, questions, and perhaps even improvements are in order, the time is today.
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