Yesterday Judge Dan Bein, the President of the State Water Crisis Investigative Committee, delivered the final report and defined the problem very clearly: Confusion and Inconsistency. Successive Israeli governments adopted decisions that were modified, forgotten, half or not implemented, there was never a firm decision on anything, the goals of water desalination were unclear from the start, there was constant infighting - one Ministry sabotaging the other one -, the usual Israeli mess. There are no conclusions and no one is being accused of having done anything wrong. Things just happened that way.
6 comments:
What you call "the usual Israeli mess" my parents would call a "Yiddish cheyder" , calling to mind a room full of little boys shouting and yanking the other boys' payas while a blind old melamed presides ineffectually.
It is frightening to think that the undemocratic Chinese may actually have a more effective system. If their leadership decides to build something, it gets built right away and is not bogged down in endless pilpul. They decided to build a high speed rail line between Beijing and Shanghai and they put 100,000 workers on the job so it could be built all at once. I took the old train line which runs right next to it and I had never seen anything like it - a 1000 kilometer long construction site with workers at every point. In NY the World Trade Center site is still an empty hole in the ground almost 10 years later - the Chinese have built entire cities worth of skyscrapers in that time. Sometimes it is more important to make a decision, even if it is not the best decision, than it is to debate endlessly.
K
More than yiddish cheyder we resemble the running of a synagogue in which everyone is a volunteer and donating money and full of good will, but the most important thing is the koved. Intense intrigues and secret enemities are maintained for years, and the task on hand loses urgency and reality. Here too everybody knew something had to be done and they were for doing it, but the overimportant issues of koved had to be sorted out first. The water crisis never reached critical point in Israel, we always had good and abundant water, and important things are in fact done, but the hysteria and accusations and bitching around the issue is so noisy and confusing that someone from outside may think nothing is done and everybody is an incompetent. When someone very intelligent and objective like Dan Bein analyses what is happening, he arrives the conclusion that the water "crisis" is just the usual "hystery" that is the Israeli way of doing things.
Someone once said you could get anything done as long as you were willing to let other people take credit (receive the koved) for it.
K
He was not Jewish. It is unimaginable that a Jew would allow anything to happen and somebody else taking the credit. Better nothing be done. That's how we are. I am reading the Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, and most of the personalities are New York Jews. But also a black Reverend, a WASP bond trader and an English journalist. None is attractive, all are funny.
I think you are right - in a synagogue type situation , koved is all there is. It's like the old joke about why academic politics is so vicious - it's because the stakes are so low.
Wolfe is tremendously enjoyable, though Bonfires is like an '80s timecapsule. He is like the Balzac of our age.
K
Wolfe is wonderful. I enjoyed his description of Ruskin's funeral.
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