Policy area: Citizens first — civil preparedness and the diaspora-facing state

Pipeline stage: 1 — testimony captured. Research not yet started.

Stage	Status
1. Testimony	✅ 2026-07-23 — A State That Must Put Its Own Citizens First
2. Research (research/)	⬜ pending — run /research-policy citizens-first
3. Paper (paper/)	⬜ pending
4. Platform section	⬜ pending

Framing note

This area joins two claims that the testimony treats as one: that the state under-delivers the most basic protective services to the people who live here (shelters that failed in the Iranian war being the sharpest case), and that it simultaneously funds a growing apparatus whose declared beneficiary is world Jewry rather than the Israeli public — diaspora affairs, antisemitism, and hasbara.

The link between them is a budgetary one and a legitimacy one, and the research must keep them separable, because they can fail independently:

• The budgetary claim is empirical and testable: how much is actually spent on diaspora-facing and public-diplomacy bodies, and what would that money buy in shelter refurbishment, education, or regulatory capacity? If the sums are small relative to the domestic gap, the argument must rest on the second claim, not the first.
• The legitimacy claim is normative: that a democratic state cannot claim to speak for non-citizens who have not opted into its politics, and that doing so conflates Judaism with Israeli identity in a way that harms both. This is the paper’s most contested plank and needs the strongest steelmanning — including the case that the state’s diaspora role is a founding commitment, not a discretionary programme.

The deliverable is a reallocation proposal with a costed civil-preparedness programme attached, not a critique of diaspora policy in the abstract. A proposal to cut without a specified destination for the money will not survive the paper stage.

Scope notes for the research stage

Carried over from the testimony — every claim below is testimony-as-experience and requires quantification or legal verification.

Civil preparedness — the failure

• Statutory basis: Civil Defence Law, 5711-1951, and the shelter-provision duties it imposes; the building-code requirement for a mamad (protected space) and the date from which it applies — this is the legal reason older buildings, including the one in the testimony, have none. Cite provisions precisely.
• Division of responsibility between the Home Front Command (פיקוד העורף), the Ministry of Defence, and local authorities for maintaining public shelters (מקלטים ציבוריים) — the maintenance duty, and who funds it, is the crux.
• How many public shelters exist, how many were found unfit, and on what inspection basis. State Comptroller reports on home-front preparedness are the primary source here; Knesset Research and Information Center for the budget line. [UNVERIFIED] until sourced.
• Share of the housing stock without a mamad or building shelter, by locality and by socioeconomic decile — the equity dimension. CBS housing data.
• What was actually spent on shelter refurbishment in the years before and after the Iranian war, and what the identified gap costs to close.
• The testimony’s specific account (no shelter in the building; sewage ingress in the public shelter used) is evidence of experience. Prevalence requires the inspection data above.

The other domestic failures named in the testimony (scoped here only insofar as they are the destination for reallocated budget; each may warrant its own area)

• Education: the claim of “worrying signs with downstream repercussions for STEM subjects” needs specifics — PISA/TIMSS trends, matriculation (bagrut) rates in 5-unit mathematics, physics and computer science, teacher shortages in those subjects. Sources: Ministry of Education, RAMA (הרשות הארצית למדידה והערכה), OECD.
• Rental and housing crisis — cross-reference the rental-market area rather than duplicating.
• “Regulatory crisis” — the testimony does not specify. Ask the author to scope this before researching it.

The diaspora-facing and public-diplomacy apparatus — what actually exists

• Enumerate the bodies and their legal basis: Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism (המשרד לענייני תפוצות ומאבק באנטישמיות), the National Public Diplomacy Directorate / hasbara functions, the Government Advertising Agency (לשכת הפרסום הממשלתית), the Jewish Agency and its state funding, and any special-purpose funds created in the last two Knessets (e.g. antisemitism-related funds and the “Voice of Israel”-type initiatives — verify names, statutory basis and current status).
• Budgeted versus executed spend per body, per year, from the state budget books (ספר התקציב) and Ministry of Finance execution reports. Distinguish core budget from war-period supplementary allocations.
• Which functions are genuinely diaspora-facing versus which are consular, security-related, or serve Israeli citizens abroad — the latter are not in scope for cuts and conflating them would sink the argument.
• Also relevant: the Law of Return and citizenship-adjacent functions, which are a state–diaspora link the proposal presumably does not touch. Say so explicitly.

Comparative review — how other states relate to a diaspora or co-religionist population

• Ireland — a large diaspora, an explicit diaspora policy and a Minister for the Diaspora, but no claim to speak for it. The closest structural analogue and the most useful model.
• Hungary / Poland — kin-state politics: extraterritorial citizenship and voting rights for co-ethnics abroad, and the democratic-legitimacy critiques that followed. A cautionary case.
• Germany / Italy — external-citizen representation (Italy reserves parliamentary seats for citizens abroad); how representation is tied to citizenship, not ethnicity or religion.
• Armenia, Greece — diaspora ministries and their scope.
• Civil-preparedness comparators, separately: Switzerland and Finland on universal shelter provision and maintenance regimes; Singapore on retrofit obligations. These are the models for the spending side of the proposal.

Proposals to develop (each costed and steelmanned)

• A statutory shelter standard with an inspection-and-publication regime, a named responsible authority, and a funded refurbishment programme with a deadline.
• Retrofit support for pre-mamad housing stock, prioritised by exposure and by socioeconomic decile.
• Consolidation or closure of diaspora-facing and public-diplomacy bodies, with the freed budget hypothecated to the preparedness programme. Specify which functions transfer to the Foreign Ministry and which end.
• A declaratory principle — the state acts for its citizens and residents; it may support Jewish communities abroad on request, but does not represent them or speak in their name.

Trade-offs that must be answered

• Security and foreign-policy cost. Cutting hasbara during or after a war is the most obvious objection: that public diplomacy is a defensive capability, not a vanity project. Meet the strongest version of this, not the weakest.
• Antisemitism is real and rising. The proposal must say what happens to protective and community-security cooperation with Jewish communities abroad, and why declining to speak for them is compatible with continuing to help them.
• The founding commitment. Israel’s self-definition includes a relationship to world Jewry; the Law of Return embodies it. The paper must state where the line falls between that commitment and the representational claim it rejects.
• Diaspora reaction and philanthropy. A large share of donor funding and political advocacy flows from the communities the proposal declines to represent. The fiscal case must net this out.
• The sums may be small. If diaspora and hasbara budgets turn out to be a rounding error against the preparedness gap, say so plainly and rest the argument on legitimacy and on other funding sources.
• Who loses. Name them: the bodies closed, their staff, and the communities that value the current relationship.