State-Local Relations in Israel
Daniel J. Elazar
Israel is well-known as a state in which political power is
heavily concentrated in its central institutions, both government
and party. The small size of the country, its development as a
result of ideologically motivated effort, and the political
traditon it has inherited from both Jewish and non-Jewish sources
have all coalesced to make this so. At the same time, it is a
mistake to think of Israeli government as "centralized" in the
usual sense of the word. Power is divided among several centers
within the Israeli polity but the centers are organized on
cultural-ideological rather than along territorial lines. This
means that local government in Israel, which is necessarily
territorially based, operates at a handicap. It is often viewed,
not incorrectly, as the weakest link in the state's political
system. From a power perspective, local governments are indeed
subordinate to governmental and party centers, not to speak of the
religious communities, in many ways. Nevertheless, it is a
mistake to underestimate either the role or the influence of local
government in the state.
Local government plays an important role in Israeli society,
particularly in connection with the following four tasks: 1) the
provision and administration of governmental services; 2) the
recruitment and advancement of political leadership; 3) the
fostering of channels of political communication between the
governors and the governed; and 4) the maintenance of necessary or
desired diversity within a small country where there are heavy
pressures toward homogeneity. All four of these tasks are of
great importance in the integration of what is still a very new
society of immigrants or the children of immigrants. The role
played by local government in meeting the challenges they pose
makes it a far more vital factor on the Israeli scene than it is
often given credit for being.
Local self-government was the first vehicle for asserting the
national goals of the Zionist movement. The first Zionist
colonies were created as self-governing covenant communities not
dissimilar in the fundaments of their political organizations to
the early Puritan settlements of New England. Somewhat later, the
first local governments in their present forms were organized by
the Jewish pioneers under the laws of the British Mandate as the
precursors of the state. They were designed to give the pioneers
as much autonomy as possible while the country was still under
British rule.
Thus the first local governments were fostered as alternatives to
foreign government and were treated by organized Jewish community
in Palestine as important elements in the drive for a Jewish
state. Jewish municpaltities such as Tel-Aviv, local councils such
as Petach Tikvah, regional councils (which were federations of
Jewish agricultural settlements) such as Emek HaYarden and HaGalil
HaElyon, as well as the governing committees of the kibbutzim and
moshavim, were all encouraged by the Zionist authorities as a
means of advancing the cause of Jewish self-government. In those
pre-statehood days, the Jewish local governments took on many of
the responsibilities that were later to become the province of the
State and provided a wide range of services which they initiated
and organized in the first place. In this, they were specifically
encouraged by the Mandatory government which itself maintained
only the minimum in the way of governmental services for political
reasons, allowing the Jews and Arabs of what was then Palestine to
determine the level of services to be provided in their own
sectors. It should be noted that the Arabs resisted any efforts
on the part of the British to establish local government
institutions in their communities on the grounds that they would
interfere with the traditional patterns of local rule whereby the
leading family or families maintained well-nigh absolute control
over their fellow villagers.
Even in the Mandatory period, local governments also served the
cause of maintaining diversity within the framework of the Zionist
movement. The General Zionists and other right and center parties
that were excluded from positions of power in the
Histadrut dominated countrywide organs of the Jewish "state within
a state" were able to establish power bases of their own in a
number of the Jewish municipalities which gave them a share and a
stake in the upbuilding of the land. Moreover, many of the future
leaders of the state took their first steps on the road to
political careers in the local polities, urban or rural,
especially in the kibbutzim. Finally, the very nature of the
Yishuv meant that the Jewish local governments would be central
factors in the enhancement of political communication among the
members of the new society. The history of local government in
pre-state Israel is yet to be written but when it is there is no
doubt that the record will show that it played an important role
as a training ground for the state in the making.
With the establishment of the state in 1948, local government
passed off the center of the political stage. Not unexpectedly,
the new state began to assume responsibility for many public
functions which had rested in local governmental hands for lack of
central institutions. Political leadership gravitated toward the
offices of the new state, leaving only those members of the
opposition parties for whom the limited responsibilities of
service in the Knesset were not sufficient and those kibbutzniks
who wished to stay home to seek local office actively. In the
process of sorting out state and local functions, the party
organizations and the Histadrut interposed themselves between the
fledgling state and the local governments, further weakening the
autonomy of the local leadership.
At the same time, the mass immigration to Israel in the years
1948-1953 shifted the patterns of settlement in the country in
such a way that the kibbutzim and veteran moshavim, the local
communities possessing the best access to the state and the most
power to maintain their local autonomy, declined in importance
relative to other local communities. On the other hand, the
development towns and the immigrant settlements, potentially the
least powerful local communities, became significant elements in
the constellation of local governments. While new kibbutzim were
established in this period, the kibbutz as such failed to attract
many of the new immigrants, so that, although they preserved their
own relatively autonomous position within Israeli civil society,
they were unable to extend the benefits of their influential role
to many of the new arrivals.
The reduction in the power of local government was not necessarily
the result of calculated policy but, rather, the result of a
natural transfer of powers that could only have that effect.
Indeed, the new state took it upon itself to foster local
government institutions from the first. Reversing the pattern
established in Mandatory days, the central authorities themselves
moved to establish new local authorities. The number of Jewish
settlements enjoying municipal status rose from 36 in 1948 to 107
by 1968. The number of regional councils (federations of rural
settlements) rose from 4 to 50 (consolidation has since reduced
the number to 47). Moreover, new rural settlements were all
encouraged to develop local committees of their own for their
internal self-government. Finally, and perhaps most significant,
the Arab and Druze villages were also encouraged to establish
modern municipal governments of their own and did so in
substantial numbers, thereby opening the door to political
participation for thousands of non-Jews who had previously been
caught in the embrace of a traditional society that confined
political power to the hands of a tiny elite. In addition to the
establishment of new local governments, established local
governments were upgraded and their structures and functions more
or less regularized according to standard statewide patterns.
The same standardization that was brought to governmental
activities was extended to politics as well. Regularization
brought with it the patterns of voting on the local plane that
were becoming fixed statewide. The opposition parties lost
control of most of the local governments which had been in their
hands in the prestate period and were replaced by new coalitions
dominated by Mapai, the Israel labor party that was dominant in
the country as a whole. If the establishment of the state
strengthened the hands of the parliamentary organization, the mass
immigration strengthened the hands of the political party
organizations. Whereas in the small Yishuv before statehood the
party members could play significant roles in party
decision-making, as the population grew and the elements which
came in were for the most part politically unsophisticated, the
professional party leaders took over direction of party affairs,
relying upon the new voting masses who turned out for them at the
polls but who were not prepared to participate actively in party
government. This had the effect of increasing the role of the
central organs of the political parties, enabling them to become
the mediating elements between state and local governing bodies
with their respective versions of coalition politics.
In keeping with the party federalism that is a major feature of
Israel's political system, the new immigrants were divided among
the parties according to each party's strength in the general
elections, as soon as they arrived in the country. Each party was
made responsible for providing the new immigrants with jobs,
assisting them in settling in, and providing for their basic
social and religious needs, thereby creating bonds of dependence
between them. This pattern of division which is known in Israel
as the "party key" was institutionalized at all points in the
political system and through much of the economic system, across
all levels of governmental society. Use of the party key system
meant that each party would retain the same relative strength from
election to election while ensuring that all new immigrants would
fit into the political system through some lasting tie with
"their" political party.
Local government reached its lowest point in the political system
some time in the mid-1950s. At that point, the older local
governments had lost many of their original functions and had been
absorbed in the statewide party system along lines that harmonized
with the patterns of rule established in Jerusalem. The most
powerful local governments, those of the kibbutzim, and
secondarily the older moshavim, were attracting a proportionately
smaller share of the new immigrants and losing their importance in
the local government constellation as a result. The new immigrant
settlements that had been established after statehood were still
too raw and immature to be self-governing. Even where they were
given municipal status, their government offices were occupied or
dominated by outsiders sent in by their respective political
parties to manage local affairs until such time as "proper"
(however defined) local leadership should emerge.
In the late 1950s, the tide began to turn as the local governments
began to find their place in the framework of a state in which
power was divided on other than territorial bases, first and
foremost, but which also wished to encourage local governmental
activity across most if not all of the four tasks or roles listed
at the beginning of this article. The process of adjustment begun
then is not yet completed.
Take the case of government services. After the period of mass
transfer of functions from local government (and the Histadrut) to
the state, the country entered into a period in which shared or
cooperative activity began to be stressed. While the state took
primary responsibility for program initiation, policy-making, and
finance, program administration -- the actual delivery of services
-- was increasingly transferred to local government or, in cases
where the division was not so clear-cut, responsibility for the
delivery of services was somehow divided between the state and the
localities. This became true over a wide range of functions from
welfare to education to civil defense to sewage disposal.
The nature of these sharing arrangements should be made clear.
They did not involve a sharing among equal partners but rather a
sharing by superior and subordinate. But sharing did become the
norm, which meant that, at the very least, the local governments
were forced to develop cadres of civil servants with sufficient
administrative skills to provide the services that the state
promised all its citizens. This opened the doors to the
recruitment and development of a new class of participants in the
governmental process that has drawn in people from all segments of
Israeli society out of necessity.
Moreover, unlike local government in the countries with very
heterogenous populations like the United States, local governments
in Israel undertake a range of social and cultural functions which
extend beyond the ordinary police functions of local government.
These range from the provision of religious services to the
management of orchestras and drama groups, from the maintenance of
day care centers to the awarding of literary prizes. No small
share of the importance of local governments in Israel flows from
its role in undertaking these functions as part of their task of
fostering the social and cultural integration of the community.
Forms of Local Government
Urban government in Israel legally takes two forms, cities and
local councils, with the distinction between them minimal. The
largest local communities are legally cities with full municipal
powers, but, in the English tradition of ultra vires, they possess
only those powers specifically granted to them, and, in the case
of conflict with the state, city powers are interpreted narrowly.
Small urban places are formally termed local councils, a status
which gives them almost as much power as cities and in a few cases
more, but which makes them more dependent on the Ministry of
Interior for hiring personnel. Both kinds of municipalities are
governed by mayors elected directly by councils, themselves
elected on the basis of proportional representation in which the
voter casts his vote for a party list rather than for individual
candidates, and each party gets the number of seats reflecting the
percentage of the total vote it garnered. Frequently, no party
gains a majority in the council and a coalition is formed to
govern the city, much as is the case on the state level. Usually,
even parties winning a majority will form coalitions in order to
strengthen the hands of the local government or to better
distribute local political rewards in consideration of statewide
coalitions.
While cities and local councils are the basic urban municipal
units, they can federate with one another to create larger,
special-purpose municipal bodies designed to undertake specific
tasks. These bodies, termed federations of cities, can be
established by two or more municipalities and can undertake one or
more functions. They range from the Lod-Ramle joint high school
district to the federation of cities of the Dan region, which
encompasses the better part of the Tel-Aviv metropolitan area and
provides several functions which seem to be best handled on a
metropolitan-wide basis.
Israel also has utilized the equivalent of special districts for
certain purposes. In Israel, these are called authorities. By
and large, these authorities handle water drainage and sanitation
problems which require adaptation to watersheds that are less
conveniently adapted to existing municipal boundaries. The local
religious councils in the Jewish-dominated localities, local
planning committees, and the state-mandated, quasi-independent
local agricultural committees established in most former
agricultural colonies that have become urbanized are kinds of
special districts also.
The cooperative sector is represented locally by local workers'
councils which are elected by vote of all members of the Histadrut
within each council's jurisdiction (which, in most cases, more or
less conforms to the municipal boundaries). While formally
private, many of their activities are of a quasi-governmental
character, and they usually wield great political influence. These
workers' councils play a role somewhat equivalent to that played
by a chamber of commerce in a small American city. The fact that
workers' councils play a role in Israel similar to that played by
businessmen's associations in the United States is a significant
indicator of Israel's unique history and culture.
The kibbutzim are highly integrated, political, social and
economic units. Every kibbutz is organized as a cooperative
society and also has municipal status as a Vaad Mekomi (local
committee) under state law. It is actually governed by two
principle bodies, the general meeting (equivalent to the American
town meeting), which elects the local committee on a yearly basis
and which meets monthly to consider major issues, and the local
executive committee, which meets as frequently as necessary,
sometimes daily, to deal with current business. Most of the
day-to-day business of the kibbutz is carried on through a
multitude of committees involving as many members as are capable
of participating. Every kibbutz is also a member of a Moetza
Azorit (regional council), a federation of contiguous settlements
that provides secondary local government services, in which it is
represented by a delegate or delegates chosen by its own general
meeting.
Like the kibbutz, the moshav is both a cooperative society with
shared economic functions and a municipal unit with its own
general meeting and local committee. Moshavim are also members of
the regional councils along with the kibbutzim.
Because of the particular character of rural settlement in Israel
whereby even family farms are concentrated in villages with their
own local institutions, the 728 rural settlements with their own
local governmental autonomy have an average population of under
800. Rather than being limited-purpose local governments, as in
the urban sector, the kibbutzim and the moshavim provide
comprehensive economic and social services as well as traditional
municipal functions. In a self-selected population (which is what
these settlements represent), it is possible for these small
communities to provide a very high level of services. Even so, it
has apparently been increasingly necessary to increase the scale
through which certain services are provided -- hence, the growing
power of the regional councils. All but the smallest settlements,
for example, choose to maintain their own elementary schools, but
the provision of an adequate high school requires a somewhat
larger population base. Hence the provision of high schools is
increasingly entrusted to regional councils. At the same time, it
should be noted that the regional councils themselves are
relatively small, ranging in population from 678 to 20,378, with
only four over 10,000.
Because these rural settlements can bring to bear a full range of
options -- political, economic, social and commercial -- to
confront any problem, they are the most autonomous local
governments in the country and also the ones with the most
effective cooperative arrangements with one another and with the
state authorities. The greater internal diversity of the cities
and their more limited corporate purposes prevents them from
functioning nearly as well. Moreover, since cities are considered
to be mere by-products of the Zionist movement, which, as a
back-to-the-land movement, was in many respects anti-urban (Cohen,
1970), they do not have the same claim on the resources or respect
of the state that the rural settlements do.
The cities are open to greater permeation by the external society
-- including the institutions of the state and the cooperative
sector -- in every respect. While the kibbutzim and moshavim are
actually part of the cooperative sector, as the elite elements of
that sector they can manage their relationships with it. Cities,
on the other hand, are often dependent upon decisions taken by the
cooperative sector at the higher echelons of its bureaucracy, over
which they have minimal influence.
Number
There are today a total of 1409 local authorities functioning in
Israel, or approximately one local government per 2823
inhabitants.
Table 1 summarizes the kinds of local authorities functioning in
Israel and the number of each. By any standard, this is a high
figure. It is particularly high given the strong formal
commitment in Israel to centralized government, within terms of
state-local relations and within localities.
TABLE 1
LOCAL AUTHORITIES IN ISRAEL,
(1981)
|
Type | Number |
|---|
| Cities | 37 |
| Local Councils | 125 |
| Regional Councils | 54 |
| Local Committees | 825 |
| Federations of Cities | 32 |
| Religious Councils | 204 |
| Agricultural Committees | 26 |
| Planning Committees | 84 |
| Drainage Authorities | 22 |
| Total | 1409 |
Most local authorities serve relatively small populations.
Tel-Aviv, once the largest city in the country and still the
central metropolis, has a population of approximately 329,500 and
is already on the decline, having peaked at approximately 385,000
a decade ago. It is now undergoing the process of dedensification
which has become common in central cities over much of the Western
world, as the movement to better housing in newer parts of the
metropolitan area plus urban renewal with the construction of new
housing at lower densities has had its impact. Jerusalem now has
approximately 415,000 people and Haifa approximately 227,400.
There is a second cluster of five cities with populations between
100,000 and 140,000. The other 141 cities range in size from
80,000 to 200. The average city size is under 18,000. Table 2
classifies Israel's cities by size category. Nearly half the
population lives in villages or small cities of under 40,000
population while approximately 25 percent live in cities of over
200,000.
TABLE 2
ISRAEL'S CITIES, BY POPULATION SIZE CATEGORY
| Population Size | Number of Cities |
|---|
| 200,000+ | 3 |
| 80,000 - 149,000 | 5 |
| 40,000 - 79,000 | 8 |
| 20,000 - 39,000 | 12 |
| 8,000 - 19,000 | 33 |
| 4,000 - 7,900 | 32 |
| 2,000 - 3,900 | 29 |
| Under 2,000 | 22 |
Moreover, neighborhoods have real meaning in most cities. In
part, this is associated with the very formation of the cities
themselves, whose modern founding was the result not only of
associations of pioneers established by compact for that specific
purpose, but also of a compounding of different neighborhoods,
each created independently by a pioneer association and then
linked through a second set of compacts to form the present city.
Both large and small cities have clearly identified neighborhoods.
In fact, it is fair to say that such can be found in any city with
a population of over 10,000 and in some that are even smaller
because of the history of city-building in Israel.
Haifa, where formal neighborhood institutions are strongest and
most widespread, reflects this process to the fullest. As each
neighborhood merged with the growing city, it preserved a
neighborhood committee with specific if limited responsibilities
for the provision of services and for participation in the
development of common city-wide services insofar as they affected
it. Finally, taking advantage of a provision in the law, the
residents of Kiryat Haim, one of the city's neighborhoods, voted
to establish an elected neighborhood council and to assume the
powers to which it was entitled.
Jerusalem was unified by external decision of the ruling power,
but, because most of the older neighborhoods represented clearly
distinct socio-religious communities, the city has consistently
refrained from imposing itself upon them in those fields of
particular concern to each. Today it, too, is trying to extend
more formal devices for neighborhood participation to newer
neighborhoods where other forms of distinction remain important.
At this writing, experiments in formally instituted
self-government are under way in six neighborhoods, both old and
new.
In Tel-Aviv the merger of neighborhoods was more thorough, and
little, if anything, remains of the earlier framework other than
names and recollections. In the past four years, however, the
city has made some effort to revive consultative bodies in at
least those neighborhoods which have preserved the most
distinctive personalities.
Project Renewal has enhanced the already-strong neighborhood
orientation of Israel's cities. This massive program of urban
redevelopment undertaken by the Government of Israel and Diaspora
Jewry, is based on targeting aid to specific neighborhoods and
through neighborhood steering committees which bear major
responsibility for determining what should be done to improve
their neighborhoods. These steering committees determine
projects, set priorities, and negotiate with state and diaspora
counterparts.
In Israel, as in other parts of the world, there has been
occasional pressure to consolidate small local units. Despite the
fact that the Minister of the Interior has full authority to
abolish any local unit or consolidate two or more units, this
authority has rarely been used and then only when such a move has
sufficient political backing from local elites. In the early days
of the state when political elites did not include representatives
of the localities in question, more consolidations were effected.
In the last two decades, however, even the weakest local
governments have acquired political bases of their own, and any
moves to consolidate would be strongly resisted. As a result,
consolidation efforts have essentially ground to a halt to be
replaced by efforts to create federations of cities to undertake
those functions which the individual communities cannot undertake
by themselves.
The State Commission on Local Government (Sanbar Commission),
which completed its work in 1980, rejected the notion of
consolidation as a basic tool of local government reform,
recommending that it be considered in one or two cases only.
After extensive fieldwork, the Commission concluded that the civic
virtues of the smaller local authorities compensated for most of
the disadvantages of their small size and that, through interlocal
arrangements based on federative principles, those disadvantages
could be overcome.
To date, the federation of cities device has been generally used
to undertake functions of metropolitan concern and has been little
used in the more rural parts of the country. This is partly
because the federation of cities idea was developed to serve
cities that adjoin one another, that is to say, those in
metropolitan regions. The device has not been extended to
free-standing cities within a region which may be separated by no
more than a few miles but which see themselves, and are treated
as, totally separate entities. Thus, a certain amount of very
real intergovernmental collaboration in planning and service
delivery has been developed in the Dan region, which consists of
some 20 cities whose boundaries are contiguous with one another.
Yet in the Galilee, a region of several hundred thousand people
with no single city of 30,000 residents but with six cities of
over 10,000 all within an area of less than 1,000 square miles,
there are relatively few intermunicipal arrangements and little
local concern with moving in that direction. This is true even
though the region as a whole shares common state facilities (e.g.,
a large hospital in Safed, university extension courses in that
city and near Kiryat Shmona, district offices in Nazareth,
rudimentary sewage treatment facilities near Tiberias) and has the
potential of becoming a kind of multinodal metropolitan region of
the kind that has developed elsewhere in the world.
Factors Affecting the Shape of Local Relations
Cooperation
Three major factors influence the shape of state-local relations.
The first of these is the effort at cooperative activity which has
characterized Israeli society from the first. It reached its most
intense form in the kibbutzim, whose experience seems to indicate
that a shared response to the fundamental life questions of
religion and politics is utterly necessary in cooperative
communities of this character, or the community will be faced with
intolerable factionalism. In the early 1950s many kibbutzim
actually split over questions of political ideology having to do
with the extent of their socialist beliefs. These divisions led
to secessionist movements and the literal division of certain
kibbutzim into two independent cooperative societies with their
own municipal institutions.
Cooperative ties in the cities are far less intense. At their
best, the cities become civil communities (communities organized
for more limited civil or political purposes) and not
comprehensive ones. The few exceptions are small cities whose
populations have a distinctive religious or ideological bent and,
of course, the old established Arab municipalities, which are
really traditional villages which have not acquired municipal
status.
At the same time, even the cities can be understood as networks of
cooperatives in at least one sense. Most people in Israel live in
cooperative houses. The cooperative house represents an
interesting merger of the exigencies of urban living with the
cooperative orientation of Israeli society. Today some 70 per
cent of Israelis own their own homes, the overwhelming majority in
cooperative houses. Thus every family has its own apartment and
an undivided share in the commons of the building, and neighbors
must cooperate with neighbors in the maintenance of those common
areas and in the provision of common services. Where the building
is legally a cooperative house, this is required by law, but even
where it is not, it is required by necessity. Thus, for the
overwhelming majority of Israelis, the simple act of living
requires cooperative links to control externalities. In the case
of small buildings (up to eight families) it is likely that
building governance will be in the hands of a committee of all
resident adults, with one or more persons taking on specific
responsibilities on a rotating basis, usually for one-year terms.
In larger buldings, a committee is elected at an annual meeting of
all tenants, whose responsibility then is to handle all but
exceptional problems during its tenure, which is also usually a
year. This arrangement follows the pattern of self-governing
institutions in Israel and, indeed, is in the Jewish political
tradition -- that of the general meeting and the operating
committee.
Government-Permeated Society
The fact that Israel is a government-permeated society strongly
affects state-local relations. One of the major consequences of
this is that local government officials must spend as much time
working with outside authorities to either provide services or
fund services as they do in directing their own affairs. Another
is that local governments have been quite restricted in their
ability to finance municipal activities. Relatively few tax
resources are at their disposal, and the local share of total
governmental expenditures in Israel has been on the decline for
nearly twenty years.
By and large, Israeli local governments manage to maintain their
freedom of movement by managing deficits rather than through
grantsmanship, with the former having become for them the
functional equivalent of the latter. There are great restrictions
on local government's taxing powers, but there are almost no
restrictions on its borrowing powers, providing that any
particular local authority can pay the high interest involved.
Thus, local authorities borrow heavily from the banks in order to
provide services and then turn to the state government to obtain
the funds to cover the loans. As long as the services they wish
to provide are in line with state policies (and there is almost
universal consensus with regard to those services, so that this is
not generally an issue) and there is some degree of unanimity
within the local ruling coalition with regard to what is being
done, the state will provide the requested funds. Nevertheless,
this does mean that the local authorities must spend a very large
share of their time in negotiations with their state
counterparts.
Local leaders are also able to turn, in some matters, to the
Jewish Agency and through it (or even directly, in some cases) to
foreign donors to gain additional resources, mostly for capital
investment -- e.g., the construction of a new high school, a
community center, or a child-care center. Where services are
provided directly by the state, local authorities will use their
influence to try to negotiate more and better services or to
influence those responsible for delivering those services locally,
but in this they are notably less successful than they are in
mobilizing funds for their own programs, partly because the
Israeli political cutlure encourages every officeholder to act as
independently as possible.
Some Specific Examples
Police
The police force in Israel is an instrumentality of the state
directly controlled by the Ministry of Police. All policemen are
part of the central government police force, although every
community of significant size has tis own police station attached
to it and in the course of time relations develop between the
police officers stationed locally (most of whom are likely to live
in the locality) and the local authorities. Nevertheless, it is
fair to say that except in unusual circumstances the local
authorities do not have any significant influence over the work of
the police. The citizenry has even less, particularly since,
while Israel generally has a tradition of maintaining the civil
rights of individuals, there are few channels of citizen resource
for dealing with specific police violations of those rights. The
greatest force enabling citizens to influence the police is a
political culture which makes it possible for citizens to attempt
to convince a police officer to change his or her line of action
on grounds of justice or mercy, simply on the basis of bargaining
and persuasion. This method tends to be most effective when
"mercy" is involved, whether the matter involves a traffic ticket
or the arrest of someone involved in a near-violent argument. The
general tendency toward mercifulness in the local culture tends to
emerge at such times and it is possible to play upon a police
officer's sympathies.
On the other hand, because the police are under state control,
local authorities have difficulty getting them to enforce local
ordinances. Since there is no parallel local police, those
ordinances often are minimally enforced. The Sanbar Commission
has recommended that steps be taken to develop an appropriate
local law enforcement mechanism to enable the local authorities to
maintain the law in matters under their jurisdiction.
Education
Elementary and secondary education is provided by a partnership
between state and local authorities in Israel. The Ministry of
Education funds all the operating costs of the regular elementary
education program, the middle schools, and a few of the high
schools. Teachers are certified and employed by the Ministry of
Education. City councils handle whatever tasks are devolved upon
them in school matters, generally through a vice-mayor for
education and an education committee of the council.
Despite this apparently highly centralized structure, education in
Israel in fact is rather decentralized. The local authorities are
responsible for providing and maintaining school buildings and
equipment (including texts, based upon ministry lists), managing
the schools, and registering and enrolling the students and for
virtually all ancillary and enrichment programs beginning with
prekindergarten education. They select school principals from an
approved list prepared by the Ministry.
Thus, kindergartens, prekindergarten education, and high schools
are the direct responsibility of the local authorities, albeit
with financial and technical assistance from the Ministry of
Education. On the high school level, the major unifying force is
the system of matriculation examinations required by the Ministry
of Education and prepared, administered, and graded by Ministry of
Education personnel on a uniform basis throughout the country.
Thus, the local departments of education are in a position to
direct local educational affairs, and, since the ancillary and
enrichment services are becoming an ever larger part of every
school's program, their influence is expanding.
Matters are complicated by other factors. The first is the
division of public schools into separate state and state-religious
schools, each with its own departments within the Ministry of
Education and within each local office of education. Schools in
the rural sector, while nominally linked to one of the two state
systems, represent another subsystem because of the particular
orientation of the respective movements. In addition, the state
provides support (almost equal to that given state schools) for
the independent school system. Finally, the state maintains a
network of Arabic schools for the Arab-speaking minority.
Each of these subsystems has its own set of educational goals,
which reflect strong religious, ideological, or cultural
predispositions and which make them somewhat less than amenable to
outside interference. In a political system in which pluralism
has become consociational in character, their claims to autonomy
are widely recognized. Furthermore, every school principal is
virtually sovereign when it comes to matters within his sphere of
competence. An empirical confirmation of the principal's powers
can also be found in the fact that when new schools are opened
they are rarely opened as independent schools, but rather as
branches of an existing school until they pass through a
"colonial" period of development and are deemed by the local
department of education to be entitled to autonomy.
The school system, like the rest of the state, was built from the
bottom up, with parents and local branches of movements coming
together to found individual schools before there was a central
educational authority. The significance of this is compounded by
the fact that every educational institution was designed to foster
the values of the new society among the new generation, including
whatever specific version of those values a particular school
represented. As a result, virtually every school became a bastion
of ideological as well as social and intellectual development, a
key element in the creation of the new Jewish society. Principals
and teachers were powerful figures -- leaders in the struggle for
national survival. Given the Jewish cultural predisposition
toward treating learning and teaching with the utmost seriousness,
this condition was even further intensified.
Once the state was established, it became inevitable that the
schools would be welded together into a system, although the
precise character of this system emerged only after a considerable
political controversy in the early 1950s. While the schools
formally had no choice in the matter, when they were compounded
together to create the present system and subsystems, the
principals and teachers were able to preserve many of their
erstwhile prerogatives, formally, or informally.
Today the law provides that every principal has a right to change
up to 25 percent of the curriculum established by the Ministry of
Education for his school system. Given the extent to which
certain subjects are commonly accepted as necessary, that
percentage encompasses as much maneuverability as would be
available even under an optimally flexible situation. In recent
years a few experimental schools have been established on the
basis of that flexibility. By law, parents also have the right to
alter up to 25 percent of the curriculum of their school in
consultation with the principal. Here, too, the same reality has
prevailed as in the case of the principal's powers in this
regard.
Welfare
Welfare is formally a cooperative state-local service in which the
localities operate welfare programs funded in whole or in part by
the Ministry of Welfare. The operation of welfare programs is
similar to that of grant-in-aid programs in other countries. The
localities have responsibility for determining who is eligible
nder criteria promulgated by the Ministry of Welfare. They create
the packages of welfare benefits to be given to any individual or
family on the basis of the various programs provided by law, and
they furnish the social services needed to assist the family in
rehabilitation or adjustment to its condition.
As in other countries, the effectiveness, efficiency, and
responsiveness of welfare programs are regularly attacked, both in
the press and in studies. While Israel does not suffer from the
masses of permanent welfare cases that have come to exist in the
United States, nevertheless, as the population in Israel sorts
out, the lowest stratum is moving in that direction, and there are
already cases on record of several generations of welfare clients
from the same family. Israeli practice, on the other hand, has
been to prevent the use of welfare to sustain the lower levels of
the population, preferring instead to provide "make-work" or other
forms of subsidization for the people of marginal employment
ability so that they can retain their self-respect and remain off
the welfare rolls. This is coupled with a wide variety of social
benefits provided directly to families through the Institution for
Social Insurance.
Local Functions
There are a number of functions that are purely local, among them
garbage collection, libraries, and parks. With the exception of
the first, which tends to be provided at a generally high level by
localities around the country, these vary from locality to
locality, depending upon the degree of interest on the part of the
governing officials and relevant pressure groups in securing
proper facilities. Israel's local park systems are relatively
underdeveloped, partly because this kind of amenity requires a
sophisticated population for its support. Much the same is true
for libraries. In both cases, capital expenditures and operating
funds are mobilized largely from outside the community, the former
from overseas contributors and the latter from the state
government via the Ministry of Education.
Local Government and Political Integration
Whatever be the advantages for political and social integration
gained through local government responsibility for the delivery of
services or local government assistance in the perpetuation of
legitimate diversity, the role of local government in enlarging
the arena of political recruitment and fostering channels of
political communication is having an even greater impact toward
bridging the cleavages within Israeli society. The former is the
key to the latter. It has been noted that the central organs of
the Israeli state are dominated by pre-state immigrants or native
Israelis, overwhelmingly of Ashkenazi stock. Indeed, that is one
of the factors pointed to by criticis of Israeli society as
reflecting discrimination against Sephardic Jews.
The situation of local government is quite the reverse where the
Sephardic and Oriental groups are represented by local
office-holders to a degree that is roughly proportionate to their
share of the total population. Between 1955 and 1985, the
percentage of Sephardim and Orientals holding local elective or
appointive office rose from 23 per cent to 43 per cent, while
these groups grew to comprise 47 per cent of the total population.
It is now estimated that the former figure has risen to 47 per
cent and the latter to over 50 per cent. Moreover, in the
development towns where they are the dominant elements in the
population, they are overwhelmingly in control of the elective and
administrative offices of local government. Otherwise, they are
unevenly distributed, with only 20 per cent of the members of
local councils in the large and medium-size cities (the older
settlements) drawn from among Sephardim and Orientals despite the
fact that they comprise 60 per cent of the population in that
group.
The existence of opportunity on the local plane has certainly
functioned to encourage those with native talent among the
Sephardim to pursue satisfying political careers within the
system, rather than agitate against it, even though the outside
observer may well note that they receive proportionately less for
their efforts than those of Ashkenazi background. As anticipated,
what happened on the local plane in the last generation, is now
happening on the state plane as well, as political socialization,
general acculturation and expectation levels rise and new
opportunities for advancement open up.
The parties' efforts to bind the new immigrants to themselves have
led to an enhancement of the opportunities for political
communication between the governors and the governed. Given the
East European background of so much of Israeli politics, such
political communication was not a dominant feature of the
political system in its original form. Indeed, most communication
between governors and governed takes place outside the political
arena in essentially or ostensibly non-political categories. The
country survives as a democracy because it is small and Jewish and
such communication can take place easily without formal political
channels being perfected.
At the same time, the need to satisfy the new immigrants
sufficiently so that they would be bound to the party system made
the party professionals far more open to the transmission of
communications in both directions than they might otherwise have
been. Here, too, the existence of local government has made a big
difference. Since the first line of political communication was
invariably within the locality, communications with political
influentials outside of the locality were enhanced by the
existence of local officials who could serve as communicators by
virtue of their formal positions on the one hand and their
reference group ties on the other.
In sum, by fostering a certain amount of protective localism,
local government in Israel has done much to foster a sense among
the new immigrants that they have a stake in society on the one
hand, and, on the other, a sense among the oldtimers or their
children that they can survive in a society that is changing in
ways that are not always pleasing to them. While these may be
contradictory in one sense, they are typical of so many political
contradictions in that they seem to work until a confrontation
occurs. To date that confrontation has not occurred. Indeed, it
has been prevented precisely because local governments create
political distance between groups where physical distance is
lacking. Local government plays its role not in isolation but
because it is so intimately connected with the state and the party
system, but it is not isolation that is necessary here but the
ability to capitalize on the forces of integration by adapting
them to local situations and needs.
Israel has an emergent political culture that contains a number of
conflicting elements yet to be sorted out and integrated.
Principal among these are (1) a statist-bureaucratic political
culture which implicitly accepts the concept of a reified state
existing independently on its citizens and which views political
organization as essentially centralized, hierarchical, and
bureaucratic in character (a view shared by the vast majority of
those Israelis coming from continental Europe), (2) a subject
political culture, which views government as the private preserve
of an elite, functioning to serve the interests of that elite and
hence a potentially malevolent force in the lives of ordinary
people (a view shared by the great majority of the Israeli
population coming from the subject cultures of Eastern Europe and
the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa), and (3) a
Jewish political culture, which is civic and republican in its
orientation, viewing the polity as a partnership of its members
who are fundamentally equal as citizens and who are entitled to an
equal share of the benefits resulting from the pooling of common
resources. This culture combines a high level of citizen
participation with a clear responsibility on the part of governing
authorities to set the polity's overall direction and is shared to
a greater or lesser degree by the 85 per cent of the population
that is Jewish.
These three political cultures exist in somewhat uneasy tension
with one another. This tension is evident in a great gap between
the formal institutional structure of the polity (which is an
expression of European statism) and the actual political behavior
and informal institutional arrangements which make it work.
Formally, Israel is a highly centralized, hierarchically
structured bureaucratic state on the model of France. In fact,
the state and its institutions function on the basis of myriad
contractual agreements which assume widespread power sharing on a
noncentralized basis. These are enforced through a process of
mutual consultation and negotiation in which every individual
party to an agreement must be conciliated before action is taken.
Because Israel is still an emergent society, the precise
political-cultural synthesis cannot yet be forecast. So, for
example, in 1975 the proportional representation, party-list
electoral system, which has been a feature of modern Israel since
the beginning of the Zionist effort, was modified to provide for
the direct election of mayors independently of their city councils
and to endow them with a modest veto power over council actions.
This radical departure represents a step away from continental
European parliamentarianism toward a separation of powers model
which is more consonant with Jewish political culture. In 1978,
the Knesset, following the recommendations of the Sanbar
Commission, enacted legislation to implement the 1975 act which in
concrete ways established the separtion of powers as the basis for
local governance.
Finally, Israel is an exceptional phenomenon in the world of
modern territorial states in that it is intimately linked to the
Jewish people, an entity with political characteristics not
confined to a particular territory. Israel itself has
indeterminate boundaries, a condition which is presented to the
world as a product of momentary circumstances which has been
characteristic of the Middle East since the dawn of recorded
history. Moreover, a great part of its political life is not
territorially based but is rooted in confessional, consociational,
and ideological divisions at least as permanent. It is not that
Israel is aterritorial, but territory is only one of the
dimensions which its people and institutions use in organizing
space and time for political purposes. All of these elements
influence the shape of state-local relations.
Ignazio Silone in his excellent 1938 work, School for Dictators,
provided a lasting rationale for the strengthening of local
government in democracies:
The school of democracy is in local self-government. For a
worker to take a serious part in the life of his trade
union, or for a peasant to take part in the life of his
village, there is no need for higher education. The first
test to be applied in judging an alleged democracy is the
degree of self-governing attained by its local
institutions...Only local government can accustom men to
responsibility and independence, and enable them to take
part in the wider life of the state.
In respect to Silone's standards, Israel has a long way to go but
it may well be moving along the right path.
