Making Peace With the PLO: The Rabin Government's Road to the Oslo Accord by David Makovsky

Author:David Makovsky [Makovsky, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Middle Eastern, Social Science, Political Science, World, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9780429967641
Google: JwDFDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 38795246
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1995-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Israeli Decision-Making Apparatus

The Oslo process revolved around Rabin and Peres largely because Israel’s decision-making process is highly personalized. There is neither an institutionalized, American-style National Security Council (NSC) staff nor a powerful “inner cabinet” forum. Israeli leaders, and Rabin in particular, eschewed an institutionalized staff. Because he also holds the defense portfolio, Rabin wields more authority than any prime minister in recent Israeli history.26 Asked about the departure of four top aides in June 1994, Rabin commented dryly, “one more or less adviser does not change anything. I like the military way: a chain of command system.”27 Indeed, the scope of his authority is broad and the number of people who report directly to him is staggering.28

There are several reasons that an NSC-type staff structure has not caught on in Israel. Unlike U.S. presidents, who deal with many issues all over the globe as well as problems at home, Israeli prime ministers have traditionally focused on two areas of foreign policy, with which they have undoubtedly been dealing a good part of their lives: the Arab-Israeli conflict and U.S.-Israeli relations. As a result, they feel that their extensive personal experience in security and diplomacy vitiates the need for a professional NSC-style staff. Similarly, the members of Israel’s fractious coalition government are often divided on policy questions, particularly those involving the occupied territories. In a deeper sense, technocracy is a dirty word to the older generation in Israel. There was a heavy emphasis on improvisation in the pre-state era, and though Rabin and Peres are a generation younger, they retain a distrust of bureaucrats that seems to shape their antipathy toward interagency staffs and task forces of academic specialists. “There are no experts on the future, only the past,” Peres is fond of saying. “Where were the Kremlinologists who predicted the fall of communism?”29

Since the IDF plays a dominant role in assessing national security issues, the interagency process remains relatively weak in Israel. The military surpasses other foreign policy bodies in intelligence collection capabilities, particularly since the Foreign Ministry does not have embassies in most Arab countries that could serve as an alternate source of information. In addition, the minister of defense wields great political power under Israel’s coalition system, and a genuine NSC could cause considerable friction (although it might ensure that a prime minister who is not also minister of defense would retain control of security matters). And because the Arab-Israeli conflict has been the defining issue of domestic Israeli politics for the last twenty-five years, every premier has worried that a professional civilian staff would not adequately handle the political aspects of the issue.

A ministerial committee for national security consisting of the prime minister, a dozen senior ministers, and military advisers was convened every week, but other than approving military operations, it had little more actual influence than the cabinet at large. In the three major decisions made by the Rabin government during his first year—the Hamas expulsions, closure of the territories, and Operation Accountability—neither the inner

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