Israel’s disappointing political process

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Sometimes I really miss the political process in my birth country, the United States.

On Monday, Israel swore in its 33rd government. The new cabinet seems to me to be a clear reflection of what the voters stated loud and clear on Election Day in January:

•There is no one better in Israel than Benjamin Netanyahu for Prime Minister.

•But there is disappointment in certain aspects of how he runs the country so let’s clip his wings a bit and not give him as strong a mandate as in the previous election.

•It’s time for new blood in the Knesset, so let’s elect 43 delegates who never served before and have no allegiance to political kingmakers and see how they make out.

•We are concerned about how best to deal with Israel having the highest percentage of any OECD country of people not in the work force who are eligible to be in the work force and address that to remain economically stable.

•Perhaps it is time for the government coalition not to include the religious parties and to at least begin to address the issue of separation of church and state.

This is my personal interpretation although the election of two new parties to the 2nd (Yesh Atid) and 3rd (Bayit HaYehudi) place positions as vote-getters along with the reduction in seats of the first place Likud-Beytenu faction seem to support my position.

After weeks of coalition building, today’s papers detail the members of a cabinet thankfully reduced in size from the last government). In the U.S. there is a tradition, after an election, of people rallying together for the good of the community to move the public sector forward. Sadly, in Israel, the losers work hard to prove that those who voted the elected officials into office made a mistake.

Last Friday’s papers in the religious community blared out the headline “An Evil Government” once it was announced that the coalition had been formed and the religious parties would be in the opposition.

This morning’s Ha’aretz, in reviewing the new ministers, referred nastily to Rabbi Shai Peron, a member of the Yesh Atid party and the new Minister of Education as “one who used to run a yeshiva and will now be in charge of the entire educational system,” as if it should be clear to all of us that he will fail. This, of course, is the same paper that four years ago praised the appointment of Yuval Steinitz as Minister of Finance even though he had no experience whatsoever in that discipline.

Finally, pretty much every news outlet is already predicting that the new government will be unmanageable and have a limited life.

How sad that this country which has become the envy of the world (even of our enemies) when it comes to technological achievement cannot mature in the political sphere to the point where we applaud, support and encourage the success of a new government, regardless of our private disappointments.

Benjamin Franklin once said “Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain – and most fools do.” That’s a lesson that our electorate needs to internalize for the ultimate good and welfare of the State of Israel, the fulfillment of God’s promise to those he brought out of Egypt so many years ago.

Sherwin Pomerantz is a 29 year resident of Israel, President of Atid EDI Ltd., an economic development consulting firm and a past national president of the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel.