Abdication of Responsibility, By Evelyn Gordon (Jerusalem Post)
Excerpts;
Who runs this country, anyway? The question was prompted by a report in Monday’s Haaretz claiming that “several” MKs had lambasted Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz for not issuing a clear ruling on whether President Moshe Katsav should step down because of the investigation against him.
This reaction is astonishing first of all because by law, the attorney-general has no authority whatsoever over the president – whereas the Knesset does: It can oust him.
But the MKs’ reaction is particularly astonishing because the Knesset – not the attorney-general – is supposedly the country’s sovereign authority. That is the nature of a parliamentary regime: Sovereignty resides in the parliament. In other words, ultimate responsibility for decision-making is supposed to rest with our MKs, not the attorney-general.
MKs have been abdicating their substantive decision-making authorities for years: It is the High Court, rather than our elected representatives, that is determining the route of the separation fence, which may well delineate Israel’s future borders; dictating immigration and citizenship policy (both by defining who is a Jew, and thereby entitled to automatic citizenship, and via cases dealing with naturalization); setting budgetary priorities (it has, for instance, asserted the right to set a minimum level for government welfare payments and to expand the list of drugs covered by the national health insurance plan); governing sensitive family matters (from recognizing gay couples to criminalizing spanking); and even dictating military tactics in wartime (with regard to both specific operations and general policies, such as targeted killings of terrorists).
In some cases, such as the “who is a Jew” issue, the court stepped in after the Knesset refused for years to resolve a genuine ambiguity in the law. In others, it unabashedly overturned Knesset policy. But the Knesset’s reaction has been the same either way: It has meekly accepted the court’s dictates, evidently content to allow someone else to assume responsibility for making hard decisions.
Until recently, however, it ferociously protected its authority over its own members. Now, many MKs appear willing to abandon even that: Let the attorney-general decide whether to oust the president; let a disciplinary court decide whether and how to punish MKs’ ethical violations.
ALL OF which begs an obvious question: If our MKs have abdicated all decision-making responsibilities, what do we need a Knesset for? We might just as well save the money we spend on it (NIS 435 million this year alone) and turn the building into a museum – a memorial of the time when Israel had a functioning democratic government.
But for anyone who dislikes this idea, only one alternative seems feasible: mobilizing massive public pressure for changing the electoral system to make MKs directly elected, and therefore directly accountable to voters instead of to party institutions. That would enable us to throw out MKs who refuse to do the job we pay them for – making decisions – and to keep doing so until they finally get the message.