Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Monday proposed to end the tenure of the legal advisers to the government ministries by the end of the calendar year––meaning within about two months––and even grant them financial compensation of up to 20 salaries, News13 reported.
The legal advisors in question have served for seven years or more, having entered their post after 2009.
According to a 2009 government decision, the tenure of legal advisers must be limited to not more than seven years, meaning that the PM and his minister are well within their rights to rush all the foxes out of the chicken coops. The only stumbling block is the optics. After all, a Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, however legal, is still a massacre, and Bibi and Smotrich want to do it within two months and three days. As to the inevitably short overlap – the ministries will be instructed to appoint substitutes from within the staff.
In addition to the two key legal counselors – the Attorney General, whose head is not on the chopping block at this time, and the Justice Ministry’s legal adviser, whose head is ripe for the blade – there are a large number of legal advisors scattered throughout the various government offices and whose role in determining policy far outstretches their actual position as unelected officials.
ENEMIES WITHIN
Journalist Gideon Dukov published a comprehensive article in Makor Rishon in 2016, focusing on the dozens of scattered legal advisors who are unknown to the public, but who make the decisions. Every new initiative of a minister, CEO, or, Head of Division, any correction or change you want to make, must go through them. The result is that alongside an honest assessment of their professional quality, the legal advisers are always the ones who shove their sticks in the wheel sprockets of the bicycle of government, killing government projects and initiatives.
Dukov quotes an anonymous source described as “a person who knows the system close up,” who claims that, “Lawyers are always afraid of what would happen if something fails. In the meantime, you lose all the benefit [of the proposed initiative], but they are interested… in every event, there is a risk assessment, an inspection of what’s the chance that something will happen versus the cost and expense. It’s a value decision you would expect of a CEO or a minister, but the legal advisers come and say that ‘it’s not within the scope of reasonableness,’ and the discussion is over. Then you see factories collapsing due to the decisions of legal advisers, daycares for children are not opened, and the legal counselors bear none of the responsibility. The State Comptroller won’t give them on the head, there are no elections in which the public could punish them. The ones found guilty are the elected officials who are helpless before them.”
Unlike the US, where a new president brings in with him new cabinet ministers who receive the resignations of their predecessors’ ranking staff members and appoint their own, Israeli government ministers don’t get to replace their predecessors’ staff unless they can show a serious conflict of interest – and even then, an unelected AG can torment the incoming government and sabotage its work because the source of her power is not the government she serves, but a selection committee.
In curbing the service of legal advisers to seven years back in 2009, the Netanyahu government was hoping to be rid of them eventually. But it didn’t happen, and the tyranny of the unelected legal advisers over their elected ministers continues. The ministers fear them because the advisers are often better connected with the judiciary, especially the High Court of Justice, and they know that an unsuccessful clash with their legal adviser could end up in a criminal investigation against the minister.
ISRAELIS CONSIDER FIGHTING A FORM OF GOVERNMENT
The good government group “Hofshi B’Artzenu” attacked the Netanyahu-Smotrich proposal, suggesting their intention is to replace the legal advisers with obedient officials. This approach to politics exposes everything that’s wrong with the Israeli system. Right-wing voters keep sending a majority of the Knesset to forge a right-wing government, but because their elected ministers are hampered by legal advisers appointed by committees and not by those they would advise, Israelis continue to be ruled by left-wing policies.
The political system in Israel is yet to digest the fact that legal advisers are there to help their minister turn his policies into laws – not to sabotage him. Perhaps this combination of two very strong politicians will remedy an intentionally disabled system.
