Statism
Out of Control
Zev Golan, IASPS Associate Director
It
says something about the state of education in a country when the prime
minister can fire a substitute teacher. What it says is that the state of
education is statist. The headline in the papers should have read:
“Prime Minister Has Right to
Fire a Substitute Teacher.”
That is the real news, which on
the one hand, most Israelis were surely unaware of, and on the second hand,
is truly frightening, far more frightening than whether a particular young
woman is employed as a teacher. Not only does the prime minister have the
legal right, apparently, to fire teachers, but he apparently has the right
to openly admit the politicization of the school system.
In terms of the facts, the story
only gets more frightening. Ms. Har-Shefi was paid by local parents for her
substitute teaching, not by the school system. Thus Barak’s decision is
not only interference in school hiring policy, but a denial of parental
choice, flying in the face of reforms around the world giving more choice,
not less, to parents.
Further, Barak fired a young
woman who did not prevent the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Yet was she
the only person in the country who failed to prevent the assassination?
Carmi Gillon, the head of the GSS, whose job
it was to prevent the assassination, actually employed the man who proposed
the assassination, ignored evidence someone was planning it, failed to post
guards around the late prime minister (we are deliberately not relating to
any so-called “conspiracy theories,” but sticking to the documented
facts) and he
was given the job of running the state-backed auto-insurance cartel when he
left the GSS, and is today a respected commentator on security
affairs (of all things!) for Israeli newspapers. Har-Shefi was guilty of not
believing a potential boyfriend was serious about plotting an assassination.
But Barak would do better to
check his own glass house. For while not entrusting fourth graders to the
care of a woman who didn’t believe a friend’s assassination-boasting, he
has entrusted the management of his government to a man who has “taken the
Fifth” during police investigations into illegal campaign practices that
helped him, Barak, get elected prime minister. Dozens of phony organizations
were set up to receive funds (illegally) and throw their supposed support
(creating a groundswell effect) to Barak while in reality they were fronts
for the Labor party. Of course, even this pales in comparison to Barak
entrusting Joesph’s Tomb to a man who has spent his life killing the
children of Joseph, or Barak’s expressed
willingness to give half the capital city to a man who is guilty of blowing
up airplanes and attacking schoolchildren. Apparently,
in the world according to Barak, it is the prime minister’s job to ensure
fourth graders have politically correct views, but not to ensure they
don’t get killed.
For the record, Ms. Har-Shefi
was not fired by Barak as prime minister, but by Barak as acting education
minister. But this, too, is no cause for comfort. It is not a sign of
government limited by law, in which the prime minister is limited in his
authority. It is rather the sign of a government which in the first
instance, broke the country’s own Basic Law upon taking office, changing
that Law to allow a sitting cabinet of 24 ministers, so that spoils could be
divided, and then in the second instance, upon the collapse of the governing
coalition, a prime minister who appointed himself to any open
post he wished. Thus the prime minister is now education minister and
defense minister and who knows what else. Limited government? How do you
spell that?
