Policy Making In Israel

All governments face problems and are judged by their ability to solve them and the policies they develop in doing so. Compared with other Western democracies, Israel has faced a devastating number of problems of unusual severity in a relatively short time: war, terrorism, heavy immigration, unsettled boundaries, economic stresses, internal disputes about ethnicity and religion, and the lingering scars of the Holocaust and other persecutions. Sharkansky’s analysis of the Israeli government’s routines and methods for coping with such an array of difficulties, from simple to complex to intractable, offers general insights into how governments make policy in a democracy.

An examination of the current Israeli government, covering public policies such as health, housing and transport. The volume covers the institutional as well as the political and the bureaucratic framework within which public policies have been made and implemented.

In a nation that lacks consensus on the very nature of the state, and where policy making is heavily controlled by partisan politics, improved policy implementation capabilities are crucial for the very survival of Israeli society. Public Policy in Israel presents a framework for understanding this country's fractured decision-making process and a blueprint for the radical reform of its policy-making system.

While most current studies on law and politics in Israel focus on the legal aspects of public policymaking within the courts, this book explores the relationship between law and government from a positive perspective. That is to say that the question asked is: how the political relationships between the three branches of government affect public policy and hence social outcomes. The eleven contributors to this volume concentrate on Israel from theoretical, comparative and critical approaches, and hence the analysis presented could as well be applied to other polities. This book was published as a special issue of Israel Affairs.

Dr. Matt Evans utilizes previous characterizations of institutions to analyze the framework affecting policymaking and the tools used for policy implementation. In examining the effect of institutional change on public policy, this book compares the implementation of population dispersal policy in Israel over two fifteen-year periods.

Al-Zaytouna Centre has published the second edition of The Process of Israeli Decision Making by Karim El-Gendy. The 272-page book is an attempt to understand the Israeli decision-making process, and to bridge the literature gap by relating domestic factors with decision-making and foreign policy. El-Gendy aims to discuss the Israeli decision making process from three different viewpoints. The decision makers and the formal relationship between them, the structural forces and influences inherent in the decision making mechanism, and the external factors that influence the decision making process. The author explains how elements and forces within the labyrinth of the Israeli society exert influence on the decision-making mechanism and on how foreign policy and national security decisions are made. He expands on a number of external forces, or forces external to the decision-making process that are powerful enough to influence it. El-Gendy discusses the influence of five forces; the military, the advisors, two religious groups, the relationship with the United States, and the relationship with the Jewish Diaspora. This book attempts to take holistic approach to the decision-making process and avoid focusing its attention solely on decision-making in crisis situations.

There Are Conflicting Opinions Regarding The Understanding Of A Country'S Foreign Policy. One Viewpoint Which Is Now Commonly Shared By Most Foreign Policy Experts Is That Foreign Policy Is Not An Independent Variable And As Such Is Conditioned By Several Factors. Among The Multiple Determinants Of Foreign Policy, The Domestic Factors Are Considered To Be Especially Important. While It Is Universally Accepted That A State'S External Behavior Is, Definitely, Conditioned By The International Environment, It Is Equally True That The Goals, Contents And Conduct Of That Behaviour Are Also To A Significant Extent Shaped By The Domestic Context Out Of Which It Arises.;;;The Book Seeks To Explore The Relationship Between Domestic And Foreign Politics In Israel, With Special Reference To The Middle East Peace Process. ;;;;;;;Rs 750;Us$ 35;

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Politics - Region: Near East, Near Orient, grade: 1,0, University of Potsdam, language: English, abstract: The Tyranny of the Minority: The effectiveness of policy making in Israel. Introduction to Israel’s Political System As a fledgling nation facing a unique set of social challenges and physical threats, the democracy of Israel was created in an incredibly volatile environment. Nonetheless, in certain respects Israeli democracy has shown itself to be remarkably stable—for example, not once in Israel’s sixty-five year history have the results of a major election been challenged. In other respects, however, Israeli democracy has presented itself as fundamentally unstable and subject to perpetual inefficiency. This is further exacerbated by the fact that unlike most Western democracies, the state of Israel lacks a formal constitution; instead, Israel has passed a set of Basic Laws intended to fill the gap. One symptom of this perpetually unstable condition is the frequency in which Israel changes the makeup of its governing coalitions—in Israel’s brief history of sixty-five years, there have been thirty-one different governments. The question becomes, to what extent is such an erratic democracy able to set policy and govern effectively? In what follows, this question will be analyzed thoroughly, with an emphasis placed on the role that Israel’s multiparty political system plays in this process. The political system in Israel is a parliamentary system based strictly on proportional representation. This was a system Israel adopted in the aftermath of the period of the British Mandate in order to accommodate the starkly different social, political and religious groups—and particularly the vast waves of immigrants—that composed its population. In Israel’s parliamentary system, a party receives seats in the Knesset in proportion to the number of votes that they received in the legislative elections. Keeping in line with an accepted principle in political science known as Dueverger’s law , this is a political system which tends to promote the existence of many parties, and Israeli democracy can serve as the poster child for this theory. In Israel’s most recent legislative elections in January of 2013, thirty-four different parties were represented on the ballot, twelve of which passed the 2% electoral threshold and are currently sitting in the Knesset. The political system in Israel is further complicated by the complex interplay between the diverse religious, economic, political and social groups it possesses...