Civil Service Commissioner Prof. Daniel Hershkowitz last week sent a letter to Ofir Benayahu, Senior Director of the Training, Education and Welfare Committee, asking that he look into Israel’s civil service commission’s continued collaboration with the Wexner Foundation. Citing information he had received from the Lavi organization, Hershkowitz asked for Benayahu’s opinion.
The Wexner Foundation is a philanthropic group focusing on developing Jewish professional and volunteer leaders in North America and public leaders in Israel. Founded by billionaire Leslie Wexner, founder of Bed Bath & Beyond, and his wife, Abigail, in 1983, the foundation’s headquarters are in New Albany, Ohio, with offices in New York City and Jerusalem.
The Lavi group reported that the foundation has intensified its operations in Israel in recent years, and within a decade it will triple its influence there, with the number of senior public servants who have graduated from Wexner programs and are part of its Senior Leaders network expected to reach 1,000.
The Lavi report includes a detailed list of these folks, and the span of graduates who hold high-level positions includes senior civil service officials, Generals and Brigadier, the security forces, the courts, state prosecutors, legal counselors to government ministries, the Justice Ministry, and myriad private organizations.
“The cooperation between the Wexner Foundation and the Civil Service Commission is carried out without a formal tender and the senior public servants who participate in the programs receive significant benefits from the Wexner Foundation,” reports Lavi.
Right-wing officials have claimed that the fund has a progressive agenda and that this agenda, together with the Harvard University agenda influences the participating civil servants, and that the foundation’s engagement with the Civil Service Commission in Israel is conducted contrary to the rules of proper administration.
In a July 2020 hearing on the matter in the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, the Director General of the Prime Minister’s Office announced that until the issue is settled, he is freezing the participation of government employees in the Wexner program.
The fund’s connection to the government and its activities resumed on August 2, 2021, after a left-leaning coalition had taken over in Israel.
On September 1, 2020, The Begin Sadat Center at Bar Ilan University published an article by Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen, titled, “The Problem with the Wexner Program at Harvard,” argued: “It is right to request that clarification not only from the public administration program at Harvard University, to which the Wexner Foundation’s grant recipients are sent, but also from similar study programs in Israel that are often influenced by their prestigious counterparts in the West.”
“In flight school, you learn to fly, and there is no agonizing over the purpose of the studies. The same holds for engineering schools,” Hacohen wrote. “True, public administration studies include the practical aspect of acquiring administrative skills. But senior civil servants involved in running the affairs of the state need something further: a shared compass guided by a sense of an overarching vision and purpose. And it is here that the root of the controversy resides: in the question of whether all advanced countries have a single purpose that stems from a foundation of universal values.
“For the democratic state of Israel, established for the purpose of providing a national home to the Jewish people in its ancestral homeland, it is vitally important to emphasize the attributes of its uniqueness. But the need to focus on one’s uniqueness is not a peculiar concern of the Zionist enterprise. The patterns and methods of work in public administration are always subject to the tension between the universal outlook and the one that is unique to the characteristics of the place. In the dialectical tension between the universal and the local, the key is to find the right balance, and here Israel is in need of a clarification and an improvement,” Hacohen wrote.
Now it remains to be seen whether Israel’s right-wing government will find the courage to end the conditioning of its future civil servants by Harvard and the Wexner Foundation.
