Today is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's red letter day. Israel has been accepted as a member of the OECD, and Netanyahu has travelled to a gala ceremony in Paris: to clink glasses with Sarkozy, and dinner with Berlusconi. Paris at the end of May, cool and pleasant, is not Israel blasted by a hamsin, with all its sweaty problems. The imagination can take wing, to a world in which Israel is a developed country, an equal member in the club of the world's leading economies.
Netanyahu has always had grandiose plans, and impressive rhetoric accompanied by sweeping gestures with which to sell them. Now, as prime minister, he has plans aplenty. We'll do, we'll promote, we'll act - much fervor and vision, many high-flown words. In conversation with him, the words competition and growth turn up at least in every second sentence. Unfortunately, past experience shows, particularly with Netanyahu, that the good intentions and the wonderful plans and sometimes shatter on the encounter with reality.
Netanyahu clings to past achievements: the reforms he introduced as minister of finance, which won international recognition, the measures he instituted that yield their benefits to this day. Incessantly, he recalls how he fought the Histadrut in 2003, cut excessive child allowances and led the "from welfare to work" program, how he overcame the bureaucracy and got things moving. Time and again he repeats how he and only he paid the political price of the unpopular steps he took as minister of finance.
And it's true. As minister of finance, Netanyahu's performance was impressive, but then he dealt only with the economy, and he had a prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who backed him. Five years have passed since then, and as prime minister Netanyahu has discovered that for all the will in the world he cannot always be an economic super-minister. There is security, Iran, the US, and a coalition to maintain. That's how foul-ups happen like the cancellation of the Wisconsin plan because of the opposition of one determined Knesset member ("sometimes it's hard to keep members of Knesset under control," is how they put it in Netanyahu's circle). And it doesn't help that Netanyahu turns his minister of finance, Dr. Yuval Steinitz, into a rubber stamp.
In Netanyahu's vision, we will travel from Haifa to Tiberias in 17 minutes, 30 minutes at most, because of course we will drive within the speed limit; the railway from Acre to Carmiel will be here any minute, and will reach Rosh Pina; social gaps are narrowing; the quality of education is rising and the broadband infrastructure is being upgraded; the new Wisconsin plan will go into operation, and growth will flourish. Concentration will decline, the tycoons will be stripped of their power, and the problem of executive pay will solve itself. A perfect world.
Torrents of fine words, many good intentions, but when you emerge from business class aboard the Boeing 767 the one with the famous double bed land on the ground, and remember the real situation, there is room to wonder whether Netanyahu has not created a bubble for himself, and whether he is perhaps unaware of the less rosy reality in which we live.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on May 27, 2010
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