Local Government in Israel
Introduction
Daniel J. Elazar
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.
Ignazio Silone, School for Dictators (1938)
This book describes and analyzes local government and
state-local relations in contemporary Israel. While it focuses on
the contemporary scene, it is written with a sense of the
development of local government in the country since modern
institutions were introduced in the middle of the nineteenth
century and particularly since the inauguration of the Zionist
enterprise in the latter years of that century.
While Israel is indivisible as a state, it is simultaneously a
compound of communities, including local communities. Because of
its development as a new society through the Zionist enterprise,
Israel was created out of a series of local foundings which were
only subsequently formed into a single countrywide community and
still later, into a state. This is true whether we are speaking
of:
the first moshavot founded by the covenanting of their first
settlers in the last generation of the 19th century,
the kibbutzim and moshavim, the first of which were
established by compact in the years just prior to World War I,
the cities, most of which were founded as separate
neighborhoods even before the neighborhoods were compounded into
cities, and finally
the regional councils which are federations of rural
settlements.
In this respect, Israel is more like Switzerland and the United
States, a state that has grown out of its local communities
rather than one that was created to subordinate them. Moreover,
as a new society, local autonomy in Israel was not a matter of
vested feudal privileges which interfered with the development of
democratic republicanism as was the case in most of Europe.
Quite to the contrary, the localities were from the very first
the principal repositories of republican government in its most
democratic form. There is hardly a local authority in Israel,
rural or urban, that did not have as its first form of government
the general meeting, the assembly of all of its citizens (usually
known as members since the organization was that of a cooperative
association) as the highest organ of policy-making and the
ultimate civil authority.
Thus, Israel has had no need to strengthen the central authority
in order to promote democracy, as was the case in most of modern
Europe. In fact, most of the arguments with regard to
centralization or decentralization in Israel hold to the view
that true democracy is best attained by vesting more powers in
the local authorities and that it is only the necessities of
governing a modern state and particularly one serving a
developing country under siege that make centralization necessary
in the first place.
This is clearly in line with the political culture which the
Jewish people have carried with them since the beginning of
Jewish history and which they have successfully applied in
practice in their own commonwealths and communities insofar as
they have been able to live as Jews. For Jews, there has never
been a legitimately hierarchical state with sovereignty lodged in
one human center. Ancient Jewry developed the notion that
sovereignty can only be vested in God and that all human
authority is delegated authority. Flowing from that was the
principle enunciated clearly in the Bible that powers are to be
divided among different departments and jurisdictions -- judges
and elders, kings, priests and prophets, the nation as a whole
and its various tribes -- all functioning under a common law and
constitution. This approach was institutionalized in the Jewish
political tradition which continues to influence the political
behavior of Jews even if in recent centuries it has not been the
only political tradition to influence them.
With all of that, Israel is well-known as a highly centralized
state. The roots of this centralization go back to the ideologies
of its founders, drawn from European conceptions of state
sovereignty and governance. Modern conceptions of state
sovereignty developed in Europe are based upon the principle that
authority in the state must be centralized and organized
hierarchically. Modern revolutions have sought to capture the
state and its apparatus for the people and to make it responsive
and perhaps even responsible to the people. But even for the
revolutionaries the state remains essentially centralized and
hierarchical. According to this theory, for a state to be
properly constituted, there must be a central locus of authority
and power. Local authorities, by definition, represent the
periphery, and they and their powers are derived from the center
in every respect. The center determines what the proper
state-local relationship should be, with localities simply
instruments of central authority to the extent that the center
wishes to rely upon them and trust them with responsibilities, or
to devolve competences upon them.
Under the conditions of the new centralized state, local
communities were ipso facto made subordinate to the state
apparatus. Indeed, one of the major struggles of revolutionary
Europe was to eliminate local liberties or primordial local
rights on behalf of central control in the name of the new ideas
of liberty, equality, fraternity, or whatever. This thrust to
subordinate local governance was strengthened with the
introduction of managerialism which offered a plausible
justification for considering local government to be merely
administration. Thus, the first step in the process was to
transform the primordial commune into a "local authority" then,
with the advent of managerialism, to transform its local
governance role into a matter of local administration.
While the State of Israel itself borrows heavily from the kind
of state structure developed in Europe to serve the reified
centralized state, in practice those who operate the governmental
institutions which serve the Israeli public have not found it
easy to live within such a framework because it is so at odds
with the people's original political culture. Consequently, they
have developed various means to circumvent the formal processes
of government to establish and maintain relationships that are
more in line with the political tradition with which they are
comfortable.
In sum, while formal centralization is hardly foreign to
Israel's experience, it is quite foreign to the genius of the
population of the state. This has led to an Israel which is far
less centralized than would appear at first glance. Through
informal processes, local officials have been able to gain a
great deal of freedom of maneuver and control over local affairs.
But it does not solve the very real problems of structure,
powers, and jurisdiction which must be dealt with to make
possible not only greater local self-government but better
cooperative relationships among entities when their leaders will
feel more secure in their respective competences.
In fact, the European definition of state sovereignty need not
be taken at face value. There is another approach to the problem
of state-building, developed for the new societies settled by
Europeans who broke away from European rule, which views the
democratic state as necessarily a compound of polities. This
trend found its first modern expression in the United States and
it has been a key element in the development of all other new
societies as well. Israel is no exception.
"New societies" are those founded by covenant or contract "from
scratch" as a result of migration of self-selected populations to
"virgin" territories (that is, territories perceived by the
migrants to be essentially uninhabited at the time of their
settlement) whose settlers underwent a frontier experience as a
major part of the process of settlement. Most new societies have
been founded since the beginning of the modern era in the
mid-seventeenth century. Thus each in its own way began as a
modern society. Consequently, new societies stand out in sharp
contrast to both traditional societies and those that have
undergone modernization, whether from a traditional or feudal
base, by virtue of that fact. The key to their birth as modern
societies from the first lies in the migration of their founders
to new frontier environments where they were able to create a
social order with a minimum amount of hindrance from entrenched
traditional or feudal ways of the past or on the part of existing
populations needing to be transformed or assimilated.
Traditional or feudal societies were built upon linkages of
people, communities, or estates whose origins are lost in history
and, consequently are generally accepted as organic by their
members. New societies, in contrast, are constructed upon
conscious (and usually historically verifiable) contractual or
covenantal relationships among individuals and groups, based on
some sense of national vocation that bound their founders
together and in some form continues to bind subsequent
generations. The founders of the new societies, in creating
social and political institutions anew on the frontier, were
motivated by a common sense of vocation based on ideologies or
commitments they brought with them, forged in the process of
nation-building, a sense of vocation that continues to serve as a
shared mystique (a future-oriented myth) to inspire or justify
their efforts or those of their heirs at national development.
The actual creation of their civil societies was almost
invariably manifested through some kind of constituting act,
usually one that was concretized in documentary form. Even if
no single compact was involved, the social and political
organization of each new society is based on many "little"
compacts or covenants, necessitated by the realities of having to
consciously and formally create new settlements and institutions
on virgin soil, rather than allowing them to evolve slowly over
time.
In new societies, then, local and national attachments are likely
to go hand in hand, having developed as part of the same
conscious effort to build something new. If specific local
settlements preceeded the formation of national institutions, in
others the reverse was the case. Under such conditions, local
attachments have functioned primarily to allow for the expression
of what are, in the end, nuances of differences within the
overall thrust of the nation's animating mystique. While these
nuances may be crucial to those who express them and may even
lead to political conflict within the new society, in fact they
function within the developing consensus.
More important, local attachments may well be used as a means to
accommodate such differences of emphasis in such a way as
to avoid head-on clashes between their proponents that might
damage the overall thrust toward national integration. Thus,
local attachments in new societies support political and social
integration and differentiation on a new plane, where they
operate in tandem to advance the overall goals of national
integration while providing vital and necessary opportunities for
differentiation within the overall consensus, opportunities
which, if lacking, would actually jeopardize national integration
itself.
Israel is a classic example of such a new society, along with
countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand. The development of its system of local government is
an equally classic manifestation of this phenomenon.
In recognition of this characteristic of Israeli society, the
appropriate constitutional model for state-local relations in
Israel is not hierarchical in the sense that the local
authorities are to be considered administrative arms of the
central government. It is not even central-peripheral in the
sense that the local authorities are defined as peripheral to the
central organs of the state. The State of Israel as a whole is a
mosaic compounded of state and local authorities functioning
together, each with its appropriate competences, powers and tasks
and each deriving its authority directly or indirectly from the
people. Elected officials, whether state or local, derive their
authority equally from the people with their position in the
overall structure essentially related to the scope of their
respective constituencies.
The state provides the framework for this mosaic and its organs
are responsible for its framing functions, but within that
framework the local authorities and their organs are equally
responsible for their respective functions. This is not to say
that the state does not or should not exercise authority over
local governments under the law in a wide variety of fields,
including an ultimate authority under the constitution for the
specific way in which local government is constituted. What it
does mean, however, is that the right of local government is an
inherent right guaranteed by Israel's constitutional tradition,
accepted as a right in Jewish law, and reaffirmed in practice by
the reality of the founding and development of modern Israel
through the Zionist enterprise, part and parcel of the compact
which unites the people of the land within a body politic.
The State Commission on Local Government (1976-1980) summarized
this position in a resolution (adopted on March 8, 1977) setting
forth the fundamental principles guiding its work in the
following manner:
The State Commission on Local Government
The Subcommittee on the Structure of Local Authorities
The Status of the Local Government in the State of Israel:
Outlines (Adopted March 8, 1977)
The governance system of the state is constituted by both the
local and central government.
a. The local authorities are the elected local expression of
their residents.
b. The local authorities will be elected by their residents.
The aim of the local authorities is to represent their
residents as well as to foster their physical, cultural and
spiritual welfare while making them part of the tasks of the
state.
* The local authorities are authorized to undertake any
activity that is not prohibited them by law, but must act in
accordance with the law.
The local authorities will have at their disposal any fiscal
resources needed for fulfilling their tasks.
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* Minority opinion -- Powers of the local authority should be
defined on a wide range (without cancelling the U.V.) and the
local authority will be authorized to carry out any activity
included in this range.
Jerusalem, 20 Adar 5737
10 March 1977
This book describes, documents, and analyzes how this works in
Israel in practice.
