Archived Update: 3 November 2005

Although it was a month of holidays, a number of significant events and developments happened at the end of September and during October.

We start with a serious upgrade of the group's operation. We are about to begin the process of acquiring non-profit organizational status in Israel and in the U.S. in order to raise funds. We are also setting up action committees in various categories to promote the Direct Representation initiative. As part of the upgrade, we'll be asking you to provide information that will help us organize our efforts more efficiently. Any data we collect will be used internally only and will not be transferred to any outside entities.

We are planning a conference for all group members (currently we number around 60) that we hope will take place around January 2006. Please use your personal networks to tell relatives, friends, and colleagues about the initiative. It would be great if we could claim a membership of more than 100 by the date of the conference.

We've updated our information website at
http://www.directrepisrael.org
where we added a new page dealing with the principles of the initiative. We also added some new tools at the group website at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/directrepisrael
such as "letters" templates to help in responding to newspaper articles.

We are setting up a bulletin-board type of forum on our information website, where members can freely have discussions, send comments and reactions, etc. The existing Yahoo-based mailing list will be dedicated to announcements and updates. Messages posted by members for the entire list may be included in an upcoming announcement or update. Of course, if a message is urgent, it will be distributed immediately.

On October 23, I participated as a presenter in a workshop on electoral reform as part of "The Mask of Israeli Democracy" conference organized by "Peace 4 Generations." There I met a number of people who were interested in the Direct Representation initiative and have since joined our mailing list.

A month ago, I promised to report on the inaugural meeting of the "Public Committee to Examine the Structure of Governance in Israel" at the Presidential Residence that occurred the evening of 25 September 2005. I was invited through the Center for the Empowerment of the Citizen in Israel (CECI), the organization that is managing the committee. After some introductory remarks by the president, the committee chair, Prof. Menahem Megidor, Prof. Itamar Rabinovich, and the main benefactor, Isaac Parviz Nazirian, a number of researchers spoke about their proposed projects. Prof. Efraim Yaar-Yuchtman presented the recent statistics indicating that (a) Israel's democracy is plagued by high rates of corruption and public mistrust and (b) the public generally appreciates the concept of accountable, democratic government.

The flashpoint of the evening was sparked by a speech by Naomi Chazan, who proposed that our democracy isn't in such bad shape and that proposed alternatives to the parliamentary system are simplistic, "opposite" reactions to the status quo. Prof. Gideon Doron, a committee member and staunch advocate for regional representation and separation of branches, challenged Chazan's assertions but was not provided with an opportunity to elaborate at this first meeting.

Over the course of the evening, a couple of issues nagged at my complacency. First of all, what is the significance of a "presidential" commission that is privately funded? Second, if it really is a "Public Committee," shouldn't the public be in the loop somewhere?

Have a great November. The last word goes to Avi Aharon. In response to the question of why we were responding to the teenager who wrote to the blog site about frustrations with the government, he writes, "This girl could be our customer, and we have something very valuable to sell to her."