...The last government collapsed due to the weakness of Israel’s democratic institutions. The most acute expressions of that weakness are the closed electronic media market and the tyranny of our unelected legal fraternity. Most recently, the deficiencies of our election finance laws was also exposed as a threat to our system, easily exploited by foreign influence peddlers. From the moment it takes office, the next government is going to be faced with massive challenges on every front. To surmount them, and so ensure it can fulfill the mandate it received from the public, our elected leaders must take immediate steps to strengthen our democracy.
Caroline Glick..
CarolineGlick.com..
20 March '15..
On Tuesday, the the people of Israel spoke. They gave a clear mandate to the nationalist camp, led by the Likud and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, to lead the country.
Now that the people have spoken, our leaders must consider the steps they must take, immediately upon entering office, that will enable them to advance their agenda and so meet the public’s expectations.
To understand why this is necessary, we need to recall why Netanyahu decided to dismantle his last coalition government and opt for an early election. What made Netanyahu decide that he would be better off going to an election and risk losing power rather than maintaining his existing government intact? There were two developments that caused Netanyahu to break up his coalition government by firing then-justice minister Tzipi Livni and then-finance minister Yair Lapid. First, they voted in favor of the so-called “Israel Hayom” bill, legislation that would have forced the closure of the mass circulation free daily “Israel Hayom.”
Second, they opposed draft legislation for a basic law that would give a new quasi-constitutional anchor to Israel’s Jewish identity – the so-called Nation-State bill.
The “Israel Hayom” bill was a raw act of aggression against Israel’s democratic system. The legislation was an attempt by the political Left, together with media moguls, to censor and silence the only mass circulation Hebrew daily with an editorial line significantly different from the rest of the mass media in the country.
Whether you love or hate the paper owned by Netanyahu’s supporter, billionaire Sheldon Adelson, if you care about Israel’s democratic system, the notion that lawmakers would act in collusion with media moguls – or even on the own – to pass a censorship law with the goal of forcing the closure of a newspaper should disturb you deeply.
Consequently, one of the most urgent orders of business on the next government’s agenda must be to contend with the forces in our society that support censorship of ideas and the ideological uniformity of our mass media.
The proper response to this attempt to silence different voices and prevent an open discourse in this country is not simply to tear up the draft legislation.
The proper response is to open up the media market to competition. To this end, the government must direct its attention to the one remaining media market that remains closed to competition: the electronic media.
The government should act as quickly as possible to open the television and radio waves to market forces. Everyone with the financial wherewithal should have the right to buy and operate a radio or television station. To achieve this, the government needs to take two steps.
First, it needs to end all restrictions on content in television and radio broadcasting aside from provisions barring the airing of pornography and other social ills. Second, it needs to make media licensing conditional on the licensee’s prior agreement to broadcast IDF messages during states of emergency. Under the new system, state owned media outlets, including Army Radio, will be privatized.
The second step the government must take to ensure free competition in the mass media is to sell operating licenses to operate television and radio stations. The licenses should be restricted only by the constraints of the electromagnetic spectrum. The right to decide if a media outlet succeeds or fails ought to belong to the public, not to a group of unelected “media professionals” sitting on a content committee.
The “Israel Hayom” draft law was a threat to Israeli democracy. And the threat would have been carried out if the election results had been different. To ensure that we don’t face a similar threat in the future, we need a media market full of different voices saying different things, competing for our attention. As long as Israel Hayom remains the only mass media organ with a unique voice, it will remain under threat from the forces that prefer unanimity to variety in our public discourse.
Although the next Knesset will have the votes to pass the Nation-State bill, there is no pressing need to do so, although it wouldn’t be a bad thing if the legislation did become law. The reason it doesn’t matter one way or another is because the legislation is redundant. Its central components, those that define Israel as the Jewish state, are already anchored in standing law, including basic laws with quasi-constitutional standing.
The Nation-State bill was controversial not because the Left supports changing the national anthem from “Hatikva” to the PLO’s anthem “Baladi, Baladi.” The Left opposed the legislation because its leaders feared the law would weaken the Supreme Court.
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