How Israel’s Ministers, and Not its Civil Servants, Made the Tough Decisions that Grew the Economy

In “Israel’s Deep State Is Undemocratic, Unaccountable, and Completely Indispensable,” Haviv Rettig Gur opens a window into the workings of Israel’s bureaucracy that is usually shut and frosty, engagingly and insightfully exposing a little-known yet critically important area of Israel’s political culture.

Gur offers two cheers for those bureaucrats. In my view, they don’t deserve them. It is Gur’s claim of their indispensability that I mean to press against most. That the process whereby functional control of the state budget is placed in the hands of unelected and unaccountable twenty-something-year-olds is undemocratic is indisputable. That the politicians depend on this select group to save them from themselves and keep the country functioning despite political turmoil is another matter. Far from offering two cheers for the deep state, most politicians and public officials would in fact offer three cheers for ending it.

The monitoring of government spending is essential and the “n’arey ha-otsar”—“treasury youth”—of the Finance Ministry’s Budgets Department are certainly fit for the task. When Israel was faced with runaway inflation in the mid-1980s, the national unity government under Shimon Peres took dramatic steps to put the country’s economy in order. Turning to the ministry’s stars to ensure the reforms were implemented properly was prudent, as Gur skillfully explains.