Jerusalem is the largest and most complex city in Israel. According to data from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (ICBS) at the end of 2017 Jerusalem residents comprised roughly 10% of the total population of the State of Israel (901,302 persons). 62.1% of the city’s population are classified as “Jews and others” (559,849 persons), and 37.9% of its residents are classified as Arab (341,453 persons). At the same time, according to ICBS figures, approximately 72,600 residents left Jerusalem between the years 2007-2017. In 2017 for example, Jerusalem’s population was reduced by 6,000 people as a result of negative internal migration (of which, 5,800 were “Jews and others” and 200 were Arabs).

The State Comptroller’s Office is the only institution outside of the defense establishment that conducts comprehensive and independent audits of security matters; hence its importance to national security. In the view of newly-appointed State Comptroller and Ombudsman Matanyahu Englman, an audit is meant to be a constructive process that addresses issues of national value; the audit process is a tool that supports the government and prime minister; audits that are liable to affect real-time decision making should be avoided; and the Comptroller should also report on the success of those audited. By contrast, his predecessor, retired judge Yosef Shapira, stressed that the State Comptroller is not the government’s in-house auditor and that audits do not depend on the good will of any external party.

Volume XIV of the letters of Chaim Weizmann, written in the period between the Sixteenth Zionist Congress and the British Government’s Statement of Policy of 21 October 1930, gives a central place to the establishment of an enlarged Jewish Agency by the inclusion of non-Zionists, and to the political struggle which followed the 1929 disturbances in Palestine. The achievement of the Jewish Agency would undoubtedly have marked a high point in Weizmann’s Zionist leadership were it not diminished by the world-wide economic slump and a crisis in relations with the British Government.