Benjamin Netanyahu Is Bleeding Israel’s Foreign Ministry to Death

Deep funding cuts and the gutting of Israel’s diplomatic service is undermining the prime minister’s ambitious foreign-policy agenda.

Ariana News Agency- 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likes to boast of his diplomatic prowess, frequently touting the great benefits accrued through his personal relationships with foreign leaders.

While even Netanyahu’s detractors acknowledge that he is a wily and charismatic political operator, the Israeli prime minister shares U.S. President Donald Trump’s outspoken disdain for “elites” and his distrust of career members of the foreign-policy establishment. Both have played up their interpersonal skills at dealing with foreign leaders and the importance of one-on-one relationships.

This July, as Israel headed to its second election in less than a year, Netanyahu placed his strong bonds with the U.S. president and other heads of state at the center of his campaign, erecting large banners of himself standing alongside Trump, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sides of his ruling Likud party’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. “Netanyahu: A Different League,” the posters declared.

Now, as Israelis reluctantly prepare themselves for a third election (Netanyahu having yet again failed to cobble together a governing coalition), Israel’s longest-serving prime minister appears to be betting his political future on convincing his countrymen that only he can effectively manage relations with the United States.

And while Trump has launched his own attacks on U.S. diplomacy, recalling and smearing U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and slashing the State Department budget, Netanyahu has gone even further in dismantling the apparatus of diplomacy in Israel, taking apart the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and handing out its responsibilities to a host of other agencies, often as a form of political patronage.

In Israel, a country at war since its inception, diplomats have always played second fiddle to members of the security establishment when it comes to budgets and policy influence, but under the past decade of Netanyahu’s rule, this trend has accelerated in an unprecedented way.

Things came to a head in October when the Foreign Ministry workers’ union went on strike, shutting down Israel’s 103 overseas missions in a dispute with the Ministry of Finance over the reporting and taxation of expense stipends. It was the culmination of years of increasingly strained labor relations. In 2011, a Foreign Ministry strike forced then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to cancel a much-anticipated state visit. This was followed two years later by a work stoppage that caused a cessation of all consular services and a 2014 strike that shut down the ministry’s Jerusalem headquarters and Israeli embassies worldwide.

By the beginning of 2018, the government had announced the pending closure of seven missions abroad, and by the end of the year, Israeli media were reporting that the ministry was facing a $95 million budget shortfall. This was unsurprising. As the Times of Israel recently reported, most ministry budgets have doubled over the past two decades while that of the ministry of foreign affairs was repeatedly cut until it reached a nadir of only 1.3 billion shekels ($367 million).

In explaining this year’s work stoppage, which occurred against the backdrop of the announcement of a deep budget cut and the release of a state comptroller’s report indicating that some diplomatic premises owned by the government abroad were dilapidated and nearly uninhabitable, the Foreign Ministry alleged that its counterparts at the Ministry of Finance had decided “to violate agreements … and to enforce unilateral procedures on representatives abroad that change practices that have been in effect for decades.”

“We are not striking because of the budget as such but because of working conditions,” Hanan Goder, Israel’s nonresident ambassador to South Sudan, speaking on behalf of the Foreign Ministry workers’ union, told Foreign Policy during a recent meeting in the ministry’s stone and glass headquarters in Jerusalem. “We’re on zero. We have no budget,” he complained, searching a kitchenette for powdered coffee before finding a lone can in another worker’s cubicle. “We’re counting cups.”

“We don’t have money for the plastic table flags” that the ministry would set up during meetings with foreign visitors, he continued, citing a recent directive from the Ministry of Finance.

Goder said that there have been cases in which nonresident ambassadors tasked with “representing Israel in several different capitals could not afford to fly and present their accreditations,” causing great offense to the countries in question. “It’s an insult. … They don’t understand that there is no budget,” he said.

Despite the ministry’s woes, the issue that had brought his fellow foreign-service officers to strike was one closer to home. For years, Israeli diplomats have been granted a stipend for expenses by the Ministry of Finance on top of their regular salary that allowed them to host diplomatic events and travel throughout their assigned countries. However, the Finance Ministry has recently pushed for changes to the arrangement, declaring the funds taxable and demanding detailed receipts for expenditures.

Ambassadors, he said, frequently serve in hardship postings, and their travel makes it almost impossible for diplomatic spouses to have a career, limiting them to a single income. While Goder believes that the request for documentation was reasonable, he and his colleagues objected to taxing funds used for work purposes.

For its part, the Ministry of Finance told Foreign Policy that it believes that “employees of the Foreign Ministry have chosen to avoid paying taxes,” a claim that Goder rejected.