Governmental Institutions and Foundations

Over the last decade, the gap between the military and political elites in Israel has increased and eventually peaked in 2019, when a group of senior officers who had just retired from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) formed a new party – led by three former chiefs of staff – and called for the replacement of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. This gap has developed because Israel’s previous govern­ments have represented a new kind of polarizing, right-wing politics beyond what is considered a shared national common sense.

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.

From a practical standpoint, the Nation State law’s ramifications are not yet clear. Neither its opponents nor its supporters ever claimed that it would immediately create a totally new situation in Israel. By its nature, a constitutional amendment of this sort, at the vaguest and most general level possible of the definition of the state, years will go by before all its provisions have been interpreted and before they trickle down to substantive changes on the ground.