A Politics That Mocks the Working Citizen
This is a cleaned-up, edited version of a dictated first-person statement. It serves as the case-study foundation for the political accountability policy area.
Israeli politics is not only out of touch with the ordinary citizen — it is becoming almost a mockery of the concerns of everyday working people.
Security is a given; everything else has been abandoned
Section titled “Security is a given; everything else has been abandoned”Israel has faced an existential crisis of survival ever since its founding, arguably in a state of permanent war. So the need for national security is always a given, and it is always there in the background.
But the issues that face me — I have described the rental market elsewhere — and that face many ordinary working Israelis, revolve around cost of living, quality of government, and environmental quality. In Jerusalem we are blighted by endless construction and noise pollution.
And yet the Knesset has devolved into petty arguments between coalition partners, into jockeying, into the absurdity of the ultra-Orthodox gaining exemptions — which in their own right deserve a great deal of criticism, but this is entirely separate to that, and to all the other terrible laws this government has passed on its way out, riding roughshod over the daily concerns of citizens.
Citizens are simply treated as an afterthought. I think this is, to a large extent, a byproduct of the lack of representation and accountability in Israeli politics.
A taxpayer-funded circus
Section titled “A taxpayer-funded circus”We see it even among those who claim to be offering change: breakaway factions, and then breakaway factions from those breakaway factions, formed by people who don’t feel the party gave them a high enough position on the electoral list. It has become a taxpayer-funded circus.
I think the electorate is distracted by the Netanyahu affair. But that aside, it would seem almost incomprehensible to any member of the Knesset that they are answerable to the citizens — that they have to be. You see this in the fact that there is no member of the Knesset who is responsible or answerable to any particular part of the electorate.
The system is so far removed from any concept of accountability and of serving the public good that the very idea a party would have to advance actual policy for citizens — and not just meta-questions about Jewish identity, the Nation-State Law — has become alien.
Ideology has crowded out pragmatism
Section titled “Ideology has crowded out pragmatism”This is why my constant criticism is that these issues are ideological rather than pragmatic. Pragmatism has been taken off the agenda entirely, and it needs to be put back on.
Doing so would arguably require structural change and not merely policy: some way to make politicians accountable to voters, so that there is actually a lever — so that public representation is put back into the DNA of the Knesset.