Title: Executive Governance in Israel, by Asher Arian, David Nachmias, and Ruth Amir
Abstract: Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. 175 pp. $60.00. Like a number of other countries, Israel is a democracy whose citizens have a limited opportunity to define public policy. Government officials are answerable to the people. They may be guided on a daily basis by the latest public opinion polls, but between elections it is the officials who interpret the polls, take account of other conditions near and far, and arrange among themselves the major lines and the details of government activity. Which officials, and how they achieve and maintain their leadership, are the key questions for those concerned with the guidance of democracies. Arian, Nachmias, and Amir identify the as the ascendant center of power in Israel and elsewhere. The term is useful, but its amorphous nature is one of the issues in this small book. The executive certainly includes the head of government and principal collaborators. It also extends into the layers of the bureaucracy that have a role in defining the key lines of government policy. It is not easy to draw the line between policy making and policy implementation. Some years ago Michael Lipsky taught us to be alert to policy making by street level bureaucrats. Functionaries in Israeli bureaucracies have provoked political crises by refusing to honor economic deals worked out by nominal superiors, by finding one reason after another not to register an individual as a Jew, or deciding about the housing of Ethiopian immigrants and the assignment of their children to schools. Bureaucrats may not exercise the once individual cases get onto the wider political agenda. But even then they are influential, and ultimate authority is elusive in modern government. Arian, Nachmias, and Amir concentrate on the role of Israeli prime ministers. They consider their dominance and dependence on the parliament (Knesset), other ministers, political parties, and a sampling of prominent non-elected authorities (attorney general, head of the Bank of Israel, and the state comptroller). At several points they consider Israel's experiment with the direct election of the prime minister. This hybrid of parliamentary and presidential government selected Benyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon before the Knesset voted to return to a more conventional parliamentary arrangement. The authors describe the secret dealings of prime ministers and nuances of power sharing in three prominent cases: making peace with Egypt in 1977, economic reforms after a period of hyper-inflation in 1984, and the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993. …
Publication Year: 2004
Publication Date: 2004-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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