Haviv Rettig Gur on Israel’s Deep State

The Tikvah Podcast

Tikvah

Judaism, Politics, Religion & Spirituality, News

4.6 • 620 Ratings

🗓️ 17 September 2020

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Over the past several years, debates about America’s so-called “deep state”—the web of agencies, career civil servants, and unelected bureaucrats responsible for a growing amount of federal policymaking—have increasingly found their way into political discourse in the United States. Though these arguments occasionally take conspiratorial turns, at their core is perhaps the most important question in political science: Who rules, the people or the bureaucrats?

In Mosaic’s September 2020 essay, the lauded Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur takes us inside the workings of another country’s deep state: Israel’s. He makes a surprising and thought-provoking case, one that might seem counterintuitive to many Americans. He argues that while the Israeli bureaucracy is unelected and largely unaccountable, it is also an indispensable source of fiscal prudence and market discipline in a political system rife with profoundly distorted incentives.

In this podcast, Gur speaks with Mosaic Editor Jonathan Silver about his essay. They explore how Israel’s socialist roots still influence contemporary economic debates, the legacy of Israel's 1980s economic turmoil, and how the budgetary bureaucracy counter-weighs dysfunction elsewhere in Israel’s political system.

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble.

Transcript

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0:00.0	One of the recurring themes of the podcast has been to try and think about political life in terms of trade-offs,
0:13.8	to try and inhabit a mindset of both and instead of either or, in which we can see that things might be getting better and worse at the same time.
0:22.6	That attitude was explicitly on my mind for today's conversation, which is about Israel's civil
0:27.9	service in general, and the budgets department of the Treasury in particular.
0:32.0	I know this might seem like a narrow topic for specialists, but I think it shows us something
0:36.4	important about the way that
0:37.9	Israel really works, not the Israel we in the diaspora carry around in our head and heart, but the actual
0:43.7	functioning of politics and power in the Jewish state. Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host,
0:49.3	Jonathan Silver. Israel's deep state is undemocratic, unaccountable, and completely indispensable.
0:55.0	It was published in Mosaic in September 2020.
0:57.0	I'll discuss that essay with its author, Chaviv Retigur, from the Times of Israel.
1:02.0	To me, the essay uses a concrete case, the case of Israel's treasury youth, the 20-something economists,
1:09.0	who administer the whole country's budget. It uses that case to help
1:12.7	us think about enduring political questions that are really at the foundation of modern governance.
1:17.6	How do modern democracies balance expertise with democratic legitimacy? What are the tradeoffs of
1:23.0	transparency in politics? How do bureaucratic measures in time come to be relied on by elected officials
1:28.8	who, in turn, adjust their own behavior? How, in other words, does the civil service affect the
1:35.0	public statements and voting habits of the legislators? We also discussed the whole question of how
1:40.2	Israel's socialist inheritance and welfare state relates to inflation and reserves and budgeting,
1:46.0	on the one hand, and Israel's entrepreneurial environment on the other.
1:49.0	We talk about partisan politics and the economy, and the limits of partisan politics in the economy.
1:54.0	More than anything, I hope you'll come away with an appreciation for how Israel's civil service works,
	...

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