Over 1,000 attend grassroots confab in the north to help plan for next government
Organized by change-minded activists, conference in northern city of Haifa believed to be one of 14 separate such initiatives created in recent months
Sue Surkes is The Times of Israel's environment reporter
HAIFA — More than 1,000 people answered the clarion call of activists pressing for a change of government by attending a conference on Friday in the northern city of Haifa to help set priorities for the future.
The initiative, whose organizers included former Labor party candidate Yair (Yaya) Fink, Information Science Prof. Karine Nahon, and journalist Tomer Avital, is thought to be one of 14 meetups launched in recent months within the center and left-wing camps.
They are helping to prepare a legislative agenda for the center-left government, which those involved hope will replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition.
The idea is to enable this future government to have the tools to get to work right away.
Yaya Fink has helped create several of Israel’s best-known democratizing platforms, including the crowdfunded lobby representing the public, Lobby99, and DemocratTV.
He told The Times of Israel that the event aimed to enable regular citizens to make proposals “from the bottom up.” He added that organizers had raised NIS 150,000 (more than $40,000) for the event from local and overseas donors and discretionary entrance fees.
“I believe in building long-term infrastructure and looking to a better future, not just being occupied with depression and the here and now,” Fink said, referring to the October 7 Hamas invasion of southern Israel and the ensuing war. On that day, terrorists murdered some 1,200 mainly civilians and kidnapped 251 people in the Gaza Strip. Of these, 101 are still thought to be there in captivity. Not all of them are alive.
Netanyahu routinely says talk about new elections should not take place during the ongoing Gaza war, adding that the “elections have a date,” October 2026.
Planning for tomorrow
The Friday event, billed as the “Tomorrow Conference,” was held at Haifa’s Conference Center in northern Israel. Brief opening remarks were followed by discussions around some 80 tables, all related to various government ministries that participants had chosen in advance.
Fink told the confab that experts heading each table would turn the ideas into operative proposals. He said these would be sent to Na’ama Schultz, an associate of Yair Lapid; former director general of the Internal Security Ministry Tomer Lotan and other groups drawing up bills for a hoped-for new government.
Schultz, who has held senior management positions including heading the Prime Minister’s Office during Yesh Atid MK Yair Lapid’s short stint leading the country in 2022, today heads Bonim MeHadash (Building from Scratch), a non-profit organization dedicated to strengthening democracy and public participation.
Said Nahon, “We will take the proposals to the political parties, the places where they can be put into practice.” The expert in information, technology, and society at Reichman University in central Herzliya and Washington University’s Information School, became prominent for setting up a high-tech unit immediately after the Hamas invasion of October 7 to help identify those missing.
Avital, an independent journalist and founder of the website Shakuf (Transparent), said, “We need devolution to encourage civic involvement and democracy.” He added that 1,500 cities worldwide involved citizens in preparing national budgets. “You are a pilot showing it’s also possible in Israel,” he said, addressing those present.
Avital suggested that the executive branch mainly made political decisions rather than the legislative branch. “The Knesset is nearly always empty. The decisions are not being made there,” he said.
Education was one of the most popular topics, with 10 tables focusing on different issues. Five tables represented health. The Interior and Transportation Ministries had three, the Finance, Justice, and Environmental Protection Ministries two each, and there was one each for “the legal system” and the Knesset.
Circulating between the tables, this reporter heard repeated calls for more government transparency, long-term thinking and planning, inter-ministerial coordination, devolution of powers to local authorities, and a more equitable distribution of resources between local authorities.
On decentralization, one participant at an Interior Ministry table criticized what he called “the never-ending bureaucracy,” charging that “everything needs permission from Jerusalem” (where government ministries are located). One woman said more of a local authority’s budget should be at that authority’s discretion, so long as there was oversight.
Religious coercion and the need for civil marriage and burial were other oft-heard subjects. Some people said devolution of power to local authorities would allow those with overwhelmingly secular populations to permit civil marriages, burials, and public transportation on the Sabbath, better representing the will of those they represented. Decisions on such issues are currently in the hands of the rabbinate, backed up by Haredi parties in the governing coalition.
On a lack of coordination between government ministries, one participant asked, “How many ministries are involved in the issue of severe food insecurity?” He then answered himself: “Five!” Someone else emphasized the need to cut the number of ministries.
At the finance ministry tables, people noted that while the ministry was tasked with building budgets, it was not responsible for the country’s values.
Specific suggestions included directing pension funds to invest more in Israel, rather than in “shopping centers in Warsaw,” establishing a single state education system (replacing the secular, national religious, and independent Haredi ones), or establishing more schools that integrated the country’s various populations; passing basic laws (akin to constitutional laws in Israel) to define the relationships between the Knesset and the courts, and to enshrine the right to equality. Others discussed setting deadlines for court cases and incentivizing employees to use public transport, rather than subtracting private car allowances from salaries for those who did not own a vehicle.
Participants were mainly in their 40s and over. Saying she had expected a younger audience, former Justice Ministry director general Emi Palmor called on those present to encourage their children and grandchildren to take jobs in the public services, including ministry bureaucracies.
Other speakers included Yair Golan, a former IDF deputy chief and head of the new center-left party, The Democrats, and National Unity party lawmaker Michael Biton, a former mayor of the southern town of Yeruham.
Last month, the business daily, The Marker, revealed (in Hebrew) that senior figures with experience in government, including former ministry directors general, were involved in drafting a raft of detailed proposals in a language that would enable immediate implementation by the political echelon.
Among those involved, the article named former directors general of the Interior Ministry (Mordechai Cohen), Internal Security Ministry (Tomer Lotan), Social Welfare Ministry (Sigal Moran), and Labor Ministry (Tair Revivo-Ifergan).
Also on the list was former Bank of Israel Governor Prof. Karnit Flug, Prof. Manuel Trachtenberg, former head of the National Economic Council, Ayman Saif, a former senior economist at the Prime Minister’s Office and founder of the Authority for Economic Development of the Minority Sectors, Eyal Hulata, Israel’s national security advisor and head of Israel’s National Security Council (NSC) until January 2023, Sarit Dana, former Deputy Attorney General, and former Knesset Legal Adviser Eyal Yinon.
