Over the course of three hours, the newly cobbled Hebrew word for accountability, "achrayutiut" was evoked several times. Any student of Hebrew grammar and etymology can tell you that this is a nonsense word. The ut suffix suffix changes "achrai" (responsible) into "achrayut" (responsibility). The new word, "achrayut-i-ut" is the result of tacking on a second morphing ut suffix. The morphological English equivalent of achrayutiut would be something like "responsibility-ism" or "responsibility-ness," a far cry from "accountability."
Around the time achrayutiut was being accorded a stamp of approval by Israel's academic political elite (but not by its academic linguistic elite), another Hebrew equivalent for accountability was making a much smaller splash across the national palate. "davchanut" (note the single ut) morphed directly out of the Hebrew root for "account" or "report," "le-daveach."
The dominant acceptance of achrayutiut over davchanut by the political elite says a great deal about the elite's (lack of) readiness to address the issue of public accountability. The difference between these two expressions is the difference between responsibility to act in the best interests of some entity and the accountability that can include a public justification of one's deeds. Parents are responsible to their children, however they are not normally held accountable by their children. An employee, in contrast, is responsible to his employer and normally must account for his actions through reports or third party observations. achrayut applied in the political context conceptualizes the elected official as an empowered guardian of the public rather than an empowered public servant.
This distinction was completely lost on the academic panel.
This occurence reflects the broader inability of the Israeli political elite to consider anything but a proportional electoral system. Proportionalism removes individual accountability from the political equation by officially removing the individual significance of the politician from the public's choice. It treats its sectarian, partisan constituencies like adopted wards, focusing on serving the declared interests of the party membershp but feeling little need for individual MKs to justify their actions to any public at large. The linguistic preference does not bode well for any emergent system that will place individual accountability of MKs at the head of the national political agenda.
As I walked through the Knesset, I ran into Prof. Yitzhak Gal-Noor of the Hebrew University, one of the academic panelists, none of whom had anything positive to say about the presidential system. He commented that nothing about the American system of government is applicable to Israel. When I asked why, what was so different about Israel, for lack of any specific reason, he simply said, "Because we are more European."
This one statement has affirmed every assumption I have had regarding the political and cultural preferences of the influential elite in Israel. This elite seeks to emulate Europe, to be part of Europe, and so bends over backwards at its own existential peril to curry favor with Europe. Part of this fawning is apparently the avoidance of any conceptual association with the United States, despite the latter's status as Israel's closest, most supportive strategic ally. In the eyes of the Euro-centric academic elite, any footfall in the direction of American values is simply unacceptable on its face.
Israel, like the United States and unlike most European states, is a country of immigrants. Most Israeli immigrants have arrived within the last thirty years, from non-European countries. Both Israel and the United States are multicultural. How ironic that the Israeli elite seeks towards European political values when those values have classically failed to serve Jewish interests except for the briefest periods in history.
The given dominant paradigm of the Israeli elite assumes that without proportional representation, the fabric of Israeli society will unravel. It assumes that Israelis, whether Arab, Jewish, Haredi, Secular, Muslim, Christian, Ethiopian, Sabra, - whatever - are simply incapable of thinking as individuals or of electing officials as individuals. How incredibly and outrageously demeaning! How fitting with proportionalism's notion that the sub-collective, the party central committee, must be the individual's thinking proxy. Again, how consonant with political achrayutiut over political davchanut.
These academics refuse to see that when government is provides factions with quasi-official status, through proportional party representation, the walls of factionalism become ever stronger, as do the rewards of political separatism. When the individual is forced to choose a collective as a political mediator, rather than vote for an individual representative, public service based on individual responsibility and accessibility suffers. These academics deny the reality that every individual citizen is his own minority with his own unique set of needs, outlooks, and aspirations.
In my comments, I stated that conflicts of interest are inherent in every parliamentary system, a point Prof. Reuven Chazan flatly denied. Well, technically, there might be some arrangement in which a parliamentary system could effectively prevent legislators from situations in which they have to compromise their responsibility to the public. However, as long as the legislature is charged with protecting citizens against abuses of executive power, the executive and legislative branches must be hermetically separated. In every parliamentary system that I know of, there is either no separation at all, or there are paper-thin pseudo-separations. Chazan supports the Norwegian system, in which legislators who become ministers give up their legislative positions and the seat is filled by that legislator's party's choice. This is not a conflict of interests?
- The party's choice still bypasses direct citizen choice of particular representation.
- Factionalism and narrow interests, rather majority interests, dictate policies.
