IASPS
Quarterly Report
Fall 1999
Making
a Difference
Comments of the President
The Director's Column
IASPS
in the Information Age
Citizens
Against Government Waste
Back to the IASPS Homepage
Comments of the President
By Robert J. Loewenberg
The "Attack"
Silencing the Critics
The policy business in Israel is unlike the policy business in what we may term the Western democracies. The reason for this is straightforward enough for those familiar with the work of the Institute and the reaction to it here in Israel. The difference rests in the ominous power of a state apparatus so thoroughly embedded in the private lives and institutions of its citizenry that every threat to that power is met with libelous attacks, threats of legal action, and ultimately illegal behavior. All of this in the name of the State and its security. We here at the Institute have termed this behavior the Attack.
To understand this phenomenon at the descriptive level, one is compelled to ask: What is the nature of the Attack in practice? What are the organs of government or the agents of the government that bring its power to bear on the vulnerable? How is all of this calculated to effect the goal of silencing its critics?
We can answer these questions with a few relevant anecdotes from the archives of the Institute - indeed some of the events are so fresh as only to be "archived" in the virtual world of cyberspace (for those of you keeping up with IASPS's efforts to move its internet web site quickly into the 21st century - see
related story
in this Quarterly Report).
Generally, one can observe that the Attack proceeds in a way commensurate with the perceived threat. In the early years of the Institute's work, the Attack consisted of an effort to ignore IASPS's policy critiques with an occasional threat of legal action. Thus, for example, in June 1994, IASPS published a study documenting the corruption of the milk industry stemming from the monopoly power granted Tnuva and the various marketing boards. The Israel Cattle Breeders Association and the Dairy Marketing Board threatened legal action. More recently, Koret Fellow Amir Etzioni published a study on the cement industry describing the enormous costs to the Israeli consumer of Nesher's legal monopoly on cement. Mr. Etzioni and IASPS received the standard legal threat from Nesher's lawyers.
In each of these instances (and several others), the studies themselves are not challenged on their own ground. Facts, analysis and policy recommendations are ignored. The lawyers, each in turn, assure IASPS that their clients have been maligned and legal action will follow. The Institute's response is always the same. It goes to work double checking its research and when that turns up no surprises, it invites the lawsuit as an excellent policy forum to establish the truth. The lawsuit never follows.
This, however, does not mean that damage has not been done. The Institute is just that - an Institute with the ability to muster its forces to dig for the truth and then to dig in and protect itself from the Attack. Unfortunately, the author of any given study is often not in the position to suffer a legal onslaught or even the nightmarish thought of one. IASPS has lost more than one researcher to the Attack with the parting refrain:
"What we have done is vitally important, but I just can't bear it. I must go on with my life here and `they' will make that life unbearable."
The Attack Gets Personal
With the introduction of the Koret Fellows Program, the Attack took on a more personal and public persona. We all witnessed the
vicious assault on Koret Fellow Bar Dadon by Avner Insurance thugs during a Finance Committee meeting in which she presented devastating evidence against their
government-sponsored monopoly.
The same public attack followed when Fellow Adam Ruskin published his Policy Studies documenting the utter waste of taxpayer dollars in the government
hi-tech subsidization program. The Attack was ratcheted up by necessity since Prime Minister Barak and Finance Minister Shohat announced several reforms on the heels of Mr. Ruskin's study, notably a critical review of the Chief Scientist's
hi-tech subsidization funding. After weeks of public attacks against Mr. Ruskin's study appearing almost daily in the Israeli press, including the minister of trade and industry accusing the study of "evil" intentions, the Chief Scientist proudly described for the media in some detail how she, as a public servant (i.e., a technocrat paid by the State to implement the policies of the government), organized an
industry-wide attack against Mr. Ruskin's study and the reforms suggested by the elected officials PM Barak and FM Shohat. Days later, Barak and Shohat folded as did the Knesset, which recently voted to revoke the insurance reforms made possible by Fellow Dadon.
The same pattern followed when IASPS published a remarkable study of Israel's Internet capabilities and shortcomings. The study's results: Israel was quickly falling behind under the burden of a slow, overcrowded and technologically backward communications infrastructure. Why? The government continued to shield Bezek from competition and privatization, all costing Israeli consumers in excess of $100 million and untold lost opportunities.
Bezek and its lawyers responded by threat of lawsuit. Etzioni and IASPS responded with an Update of the Etzioni study identifying additional threats to the "Internet Service Provider" market posed by Bezek, which IASPS promptly posted on the Hebrew and English IASPS web sites. The response was phenomenal. Internet surfers flocked to the site and Bezek recognized that its tactic of threat had not worked. A new version of Attack was in order - one no longer directed at the Institute, but at the truth and reality itself.
The Attack Against Reality
Bezek quickly posted its own version of the truth on its web site. The
government-owned company posted a news brief attacking its competitors (i.e., the cable companies), who had based much of their data on Etzioni's study. Bezek's rationale for the news brief: IASPS had rescinded its study and exonerated Bezek. No doubt a lie but why fight the
Institute? It seemed impenetrable. With the power of the State, one could undermine the very facts and attempt to enlist the Institute in the cause of corruption.
Thus the story unfolds. In the interim of course was IEDC's Free Processing Zones story. Here we observed how the bureaucrats in the Treasury and the Free Zones Council violated law and every norm of a Western democracy and destroyed years of political and legislative work in months. Lest we ignore the hard realities of these abuses, recall millions of dollars invested by IEDC's American Jewish investors in reliance on an Israeli Free Processing Zones Law that was not worth the paper upon which it was printed.
Thus the story continues. Israel's high-brow daily, Ha'aretz, follows the path set by others in the media to slander the Institute by suggesting that IASPS has published political treatises linking Rabin and Peres to Nazis - a charge that if true could lead to criminal and civil proceedings by the State. The stories, as all the others, are mere fabrications meant to curtail the public debate of missile defense led by IASPS. But what should be clear by now is that Ha'aretz and its allies in the bureaucracies don't rely on truth to discern the facts - they deny truth to create the facts. It is precisely this partnership between the government bureaucracies, big business, big labor, big monopolies, and the media that make the Attack in Israel so devastating.
What is it exactly about the Attack that makes it so unique here in Israel? What is it about the use of State power in the Jewish State that differs from its tyrannical Arab neighbors? Are there not abuses in the West that shake one to the core? The truth is that no government power in the hands of anonymous bureaucrats, and indeed in the hands of corrupt fascist dictators like Syria's Assad or Iraq's Hussein, remains above the atrocities we often discover only years after the ink of the dailies have dried. But the differences in the abuses of power are important ones and they become the starting point of any lesson describing the uniqueness of the Attack here in Israel.
The differences are not a matter of degree but of kind. In the U.S., government abuse certainly exists. But there, as in other Western democracies, is a bedrock of constitutional law and precedent that stands head and shoulders above the criminal vagaries of individual politicians, bureaucrats and the criminally greedy.
In the old-style tyrannies there are most certainly abuses. Indeed, these abuses are the norm and are institutionalized as abuses. Everyone knows
old-style tyranny. In Syria, for example, no one suggests that the wealthy have "earned" their position among the
poverty-striken masses. No one stands up in the middle of Damascus Square proclaiming the virtues of the Middle East's only
democracy. Indeed, one can say that corruption and abuse in these countries are as embedded in the fabric of society as freedom and constitutional law are sacrosanct in the U.S.
Undaunted
But, in Israel, the whole definitional framework begins to melt down. Of course, the refrain goes, Israel is a democracy. Maybe a bit rough around the edges, but free and democratic nonetheless. Tyrannical? Never. A bit oppressive at times, granted, but certainly closer to the West than to the Middle East. This is the consensus - whether it be the U.S. State Department, the New York Times or the legions of propaganda organs piping their melodies from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv around the world.
But how does this assessment square with what we know to be the facts? Ask any of the IEDC shareholders who have witnessed four Israeli prime ministers and their governments succumb to the power of the bureaucrats and Insiders they were powerless to stop. Ask Fellows Bar Dadon, Adam Ruskin, and Amir Etzioni. Ask Alvin Rabushka, a
world-renowned economist who has seen the best and the worst from around the world.
When the State's power is cloaked in a darkness that does not allow light to penetrate, the power moves from victim to victim, crippling those in its path without the label of Tyranny. But is it any less tyrannical? When the world tells you that Israel is an economic
power-house, with a vibrant democracy and stable legal system, when the Israeli media decides what is truth and what is fiction in a symbiotic partnership with government bureaucrats, is there more or less a threat to human freedom and dignity in such a system than in Syria where no one pretends to be free?
Against this backdrop, IASPS pushes ahead, building a new community of scholars who have survived the rigors of an IASPS program designed to forge them into hardened steel. They are undaunted. Indeed, the Koret Fellows have blossomed into a new force soon to be reckoned with even after they leave the protected confines of the Institute. The story continues....