Israel is known as the best democracy in the Middle East. This is a true statement. Compared to all of its neighbors, the personal freedoms afforded to citizens in Israel far surpass those given to citizens in neighboring countries. However, this does not mean that Israel is perfect in this respect. Far from it. Coming from the US, I have noticed and been bothered by aspects of the US system of governance that are missing in Israel, resulting mainly in unrestrained abuses of power and corruption in certain branches of the government. Below is my list of five changes that could be made to the way that the government runs in Israel, the implementation of which would make Israel into a more complete democracy and a better place to live.

1. Supreme Court: The Judicial sector needs some definition as to its scope of power. Some form of checks and balances. In the US, supreme court justices are appointed by the Executive Branch, and must be affirmed by the Legislative branch. In Israel, the supreme court justices appoint their own successors, declare what their power is, what their jurisdiction is, meddle in political decision-making, and answer to no one. Justice Secretary Friedmann is doing something to try to curtail this, but there is still a long way to go.
2. Direct Legislative Election: Most Israeli citizens today despise the government (or at least do not approve of its continued existence). Yet, somehow, it remains in power. One of the factors in play is that the leading party is supported by a coalition or other parties. Each party is free to make deals, receiving money or power in order to help keep Kadimah propped up. And the individual legislators are answerable to no one. In the US, where congressman and senators represent specific people, if those people no longer like the job that their representative is doing, they vote them out of office. Not so in Israel. Here, no one is directly elected. Instead, everyone votes for specific parties. Those parties have central committees which decide who will be on the party list. It is a very confusing system, where a criminal like Chaim Ramon is able to become the next-in-line to the Prime Ministership merely because he is friends with Olmert (the same way that Olmert got into power as well). And people like Eli Yishai and Ehud Barak are guarunteed to hold onto their power, regardless of how many people disaprove of their actions (yes, I know that their own parties membership can throw them out, but the system is built to make this hard to do). Until Knesset representatives are answerable for their actions, there will be no end to members and parties in the Knesset acting to further their own power while sacrificing the security and well-being of the country.
3. Equal Enforcement of the Law: Enforce the law equally, in all sectors. That means against both settlers and Israelis who live in pre-1967 Israel, against Jews, Arabs and Christians, and in both East and West Jerusalem. Free speech for all (and not just for those who the Supreme Court or current ruling party favors).
4. Cabinet Members Cannot be Knesset Members: Today, the positions in the cabinet are given out by the Prime Minister to the ruling members of his coalition parties as a reward for supporting the government’s coalition. This leads to ill-suited cabinet appointments (anyone remember who the defense minister was during the Second Lebanon War) as well as misuse of Cabinet positions. Cabinet positions are extremely powerful - the secretaries of the different government ministries have the ability to positively and negatively affect nearly all aspects of life in the country. The Prime Minister and his government should have every right to fill these positions; however, these appointments should be based on the appointees ability to fill the office and expertly run his/her ministry - they should not be based on political gamesmanship and cronyism.
5. Constitution: Israel needs a constitution. Right now, there is none, and therefore there are no clear legal principles guiding what rights the government has, what rights people have. It is based on a mish-mash of laws inherited from British Common law and the US, along with the Basic Law, but there are no defined standards. Is Israel a Jewish state or a Democracy? Search and Seizure? Are there any standard rights that all citizens have? Whether or not today’s secular state is to be ruled by Torah and halacha is a separate issue. Is there to be an equivalent of the US Bill of Rights? But at least have something clearly defined. Nearly all of the above issues would be solved if Israel had a constitution that was accepted and observed to the degree that the same document is in the United States.

(Cross-posted on Newsvine)

Check out this article in the Jerusalem Post on proposed tax-cuts that would be put in place over the next 7 years. To sum it up:

Yay! While this will still leave Israel tax rates higher than US rates, it makes up most of the difference, and in some cases will have a lower tax rate in Israel than in the US (more at the lower levels - Israel has a more progressive tax than the US does). Combine this with the proposed new tax benefits for olim and there goes at one more common excuse not to make aliyah.

(Note: US rates above based on an 3.35 exchange rate, and assume that you are filing in the US as a single person, since in Israel the income from each spouse is taxed at a different rate, based on that spouse’s tax bracket).

Well, although I am thrilled about the first half of this headline, I am pretty tired about the second half. The title is from an article on Arutz Sheva:

The 5.4% GDP jump is a slightly lower rate than in the two previous quarters, but higher than government forecasts. The Central Bureau of Statistics further reported this week that business product rose by 6.1% in the first quarter of this year, compared with 7.6% and 7.3% in last year’s 4th and 3rd quarters, respectively.

The results negate the pessimistic forecasts of 4.3% GDP growth by the Ministry of Finance and 3.2% by the Bank of Israel.

Great news for Israel. When most of the world is going down, we are going up. Though as these worldwide recessions tend to start in the US and pick up steam in Europe before arriving in Israel, these numbers wont last forever.

In fact, the shekel continues to strengthen against the euro and particularly the dollar.  The dollar traded briefly at less than 3.3 shekels this morning, lower than it has been in almost 11 and a half years.  The euro exchange rate now stands at 5.24 shekels, compared with 5.53 two months ago.

The shekel is expected to continue to increase following Fischer’s announcement this evening (Monday) regarding the interest rate.  Most analysts expect him to raise it, after having lowered it or kept it unchanged the past three months.

Well, isn’t that great for the shekel. Not so great though for those who have significant assets and/or income in US Dollars or Euros (and that includes lots of money coming into the US government, most exports from Israel, a good deal of venture capital investment as well as telecommuters like yours truly).

The dollar is now down versus the shekel over 20% in the last nine months, and over 30% since the beginning of 2006. Although it is great for Israel to have a such a strong currency, when it comes at the expense of the currencies of Israel’s biggest financial supporters and trading partners, too much can be a good thing. However, since the shekel became an internationally recognized currency, there is not much that anyone can do (though Fischer raising interest rates while the Fed keeps going down doesn’t help anything).

A week ago on Shabbat, we were at a friend’s house for lunch. Chananya (14 months old) was playing with some little toy, not bothering anyone. Until a slightly older toddler (somewhere in the 2-3 year old range) saw that Chananya’s toy looked interesting, and as toddlers are wont to do, walked over and ripped it fro his hands. As these things go, this is not an altogether uncommon incident with children this age. However, what happened next is a bit more unusual. Moshe (now almost three years old, pictured here feeding Chananya some nutritious chocolate pudding) saw this from across the room. He walked right over, grabbed the toy from the second kid, yelled “NO! Chananya is playing with that!” and handed it back to Chananya. When he made sure that Chananya was ok, he then walked back to the other kid, stuck his finger right up to the kid’s chest and said in a loud voice “Don’t!” (and continued standing in a menacing pose until we were able to separate them).

Then this past Shabbat, we were hanging outside one of the minyanim, waiting for the kiddush to start. There were lots of kids running around, playing, being mischievous. There was one sweet little two year old girl sitting down on the ground, playing with her sandals (taking them off, playing with the velcro, etc). All of the sudden, some other three year old (who is somewhat of a bully) comes up to her, grabs her shoes (she starts crying) and starts to walk away with them. Moshe (standing ten feet away) sees this happen, walks up to the bully (who happens to be at least a few inches taller then Moshe), grabs the shoes from him, and yells at the kid “DON’T. Those are her shoes! NO!”. He then hands then shoes back to the girl, turns back to the other boy and says again “NO!”, and follows up with a shove. The bully (who probably doesn’t understand English, but despite this got the intended message) backed off and walked away. Later, as we were leaving, we walked past the bully. Moshe went out of his way to once again approach the kid, get in his face and say “NO! That’s not nice!” until we pulled him away.

On the one hand, though it seems to be culturally accepted that children will be rough with each other, we are more of the school of thought that encourages children to play gently with their peers, share when appropriate, don’t be mean, don’t hit, etc. However, you also want your kid to be able to stand up for themselves when it is necessary. Thus it was pretty cool to see Moshe (not yet three) not only showing that he could stand up for himself, but also feeling the need to stand up for the kids who are smaller than him. So bullies beware - there is a new enforcer in the neighborhood.

A few minutes ago I saw in my stats (yeah, I can be a little bit obsessive about those sometimes) that someone tried to use the contact form to send me an email (around 8pm, Israel time). After not receiving any email, I checked my blog setup and discovered that the contact form was not configured properly. Whoever tried to send me something - I am sorry, but you email never made it to me. My bad. Please send again - the contact form is now working. You can also reach me by email at yaakov at ellisweb dot net.

One other maintenance note: you may have noticed the pictures that are now appearing in the sidebar, to the right of this text. The picture that appears here is the most recent photo posted on my photoblog Israel Photos (RSS). This is a site that I started last November. There are now nearly 40 pictures there, all showing some different aspect of life in Israel. I try to get 2-3 pictures up per week, showing people, nature, places or other random things. Check out the mosaic page to see thumbnails of what’s online. If you lsee something that you like, please subscribe, write an email or comment, or send over a link.

Here’s a new piece of Israel-born ingenuity. From the creator of the Arrow defense missile, we now have…Arrow garbage recycling:

The idea sounded simple enough: to treat solid waste using water. But their point of origin, says Zadik, was revolutionary. “Europe was still considering how to treat segregated trash, and assumed they could teach the public to classify it. Our point of origin was that people would never segregate trash properly. So instead of educating the public, we invented a technology that would separate the trash and recycle it, too.”

The model developed by Zadik and his partners, Yeheskel Ezair and Israel Feig, was a new animal. Trash is automatically separated according to recycling technology, using streams of water that prevent environmental damage (by virtue of the liquid environment). The natural gas produced in the process is used to produce electricity and the water, including recovered from the trash, itself is reused.

Arrow claims that its technology can turn one ton of trash into 100 cubic meters of gas, 150 kilos of plastic, 30 kilos of metal, 50 kilos of cardboard, 200 kilos of fertilizer, 30 kilos of glass and 300 liters of water. The remaining 200-250 kilos of compound materials and textile is buried, minus organic contaminants.

I like this one. Don’t build a system that relies on the public sorting through their own nasty garbage. That will not work in the real world. Instead, build a system that does all of the sorting for you, and recycles efficiently. Now, if only we can have the same sort of breakthrough in water recycling, generation and preservation (though it looks like this company also has some ideas in that area as well).

So far, I have been outed (ie: identified by someone who I know in real life as being connected with this blog) by new friends and neighbors at a pretty fast pace. Each Shabbat (which is the only time when you have any real interactions with people beyond those who live on your street and those with whom you daven) so far, I have had at least one person come up to me and say “you are Yaakov from the Aliyah Blog, right”? And that is pretty good, considering that I am normally not the one to hang around for long after davening or at a kiddush doing chit-chat (and considering that it took at least half a year for the same level of local exposure back when I lived in Kochav Yaakov).

I think that I am being discovered so easily is because my post on Yad Binyamin is now showing up as the #1 result in Google and Yahoo when searching for “Yad Binyamin” (#30 on Microsoft’s search - they don’t seem to care so much for blogs, which I guess is inline with their overall search rankings). (Yad Binyamin now joins Kochav Yaakov, Neve Daniel, Karnei Shomron and Chashmonaim as places in Israel where I have a link show up on the first page of results merely because I wrote something about them).

So…just out of curiosity, how many people reading this live in Yad Binyamin and know who I am?

In going with the general theme of this post, check this out:

I saw a response to my Taxes in Israel II post by “Kalashnikover_Rebbe” on Hashkafa.com:

I was actually almost in this situation (in the end I didn’t end up working so it was irrelevant). I would just “neglect to inform” the Israeli government about that income and pay the MUCH lower US taxes. But ideally I would as [sic] the company to pay me as a “foreign Israeli national” thereby being exempted of paying US taxes as well and just being careful not to allow the Israeli tax authorities to notice the money (like not regularly deposit large amounts in an Israeli bank account)…

Most check cashing places take 1.5%, a LOT less than either the US or Israel would take out…..

To paraphrase: Thus individual would break the law by lying to the Israeli government about his current status of being employed (since in Israel, you are currently taxed on global income). That is how I would classify “neglecting to inform” the government, especially when you take measures like avoiding regular deposits of large sums, in order not to be noticed by Mas hachnassah.

Also, he would do some income tax evasion by not reporting his income to the IRS (though I do not understand the whole “foreign Israeli national” scheme, since as a US citizen, you are obligated to file a tax return on your income no matter where you live - I don’t see how such a status would exempt you from paying US taxes, unless he is just referring to Social Security and Medicare. If that is the case, and he is in fact a US citizen, it is still against the law).

And why are you paying 1.5% on check cashing? Cheerfully Changed is 1% (and free for wire transfers, though since this might leave more evidence against you, you would probably avoid it).

Unfortunately, “Kalashnikover_Rebbe” is not alone in his enthusiasm for tax evasion in Israel (and the US). As you can tell above, I am not supportive of this approach. There are legal ways to exempt yourself from paying certain categories of taxes in both the US and Israel (tax avoidance, as I have attempted to detail in a couple of previous posts), just as there are illegal ways (tax evasion). To each his own…

Like most places in Israel, there are lots of dogs where I live. Some are wild (there is suppossed to be a guy whose job it is to catch them and bring them to the pound) and some are “domesticated”, living in people’s houses. There seem to be lots of families with dogs here, and while the dogs are sometimes cute, they are often very annoying (or scary or even dangerous).

So this past Shabbat, someone gave a halacha shiur after shul was over on whether or not it is halachically permissible or advisable to own a dog. As this is an area of halacha that I have never seen discussed (the closest that I have gotten is whether or not it is ok to walk a dog on Shabbat), and since nothing would please me more than if all of the dog owners out there who respect their neighbors and halacha would would do their own halachic investigation into the issue, I thought that I would give a synopsis here (for learning only, see a posek if you have questions, etc, etc):

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A month after we made aliyah and living on a yishuv with a baby (and thus dependent on the bus service) we felt that we really needed to get a car (spoiled Americans that we are). So we asked around among our neighbors and were given the recommendation to call M. M owns a car repair shop and also makes money selling used cars (basically serving as a middle man between buyers and leasing companies trying to get rid of 3-4 year old cars that are just off lease). So he stopped by our house and recommended a car to us. A few days later he pulled up in front of our apartment with the car (2002 Ford Mondeo). I did a quick test drive, shrugged my folders, and bought the car (went with M to Yerushalayim, got insurance, changed money, paid M, got security device installed, and was home three hours later). Seemed OK at the time.

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