The flawed, but unfairly maligned Strategic Affairs Ministry closes
As Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has long promised, the Strategic Affairs Ministry was disbanded on Monday.
When the ministry was first established 15 years ago, it was basically made up in order to find a job for current Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman – who was under investigation for alleged corruption – and therefore could not have the job he wanted, public security minister.
For almost a decade, the Strategic Affairs Ministry remained that same kind of ministry: A job for someone the prime minister wanted to give a job but didn’t have any real portfolios to give him. Each minister had his own area of interest, towards which he steered the ministry. It had the veneer of a national security position, without having any real executive power on defense matters.
It was in 2015 under Gilad Erdan – now ambassador to the US and UN – that the ministry started to have a specific focus and funding to make an impact.
Under Erdan’s stewardship, the Strategic Affairs Ministry became the spearhead of the Israeli government’s fight against boycotts and delegitimization, with a NIS 250 million (about $64 million) budget for 2016-2017.
The ministry, like the country it was meant to defend, was flawed, but still unfairly and disproportionately maligned.
Erdan enthusiastically set about pushing back against those who seek to isolate Israel. His ministry built a broad network of support for pro-Israel groups around the world.
It built a task force to defend Israel’s brand, as the Strategic Affairs Ministry’s former director-general Tzahi Gavrieli detailed to The Magazine last month. The ministry did intense research on the funding of those who seek to delegitimize Israel, finding extensive ties to designated terrorist groups like the PFLP.
That approach brought successes, such as dismantling the campaign against Israel’s hosting of the Eurovision Song Contest in 2019 by finding and reporting hundreds of fake social media accounts, which were taken down by Twitter. Over 50 bank accounts of European pro-Palestinian organizations were closed after regulators and other institutions were confronted with findings tying the accounts to terrorist groups.
The EU added a clause to its NGO funding procedure that prohibited third-party connections to terrorist organizations, something for which Erdan pushed.
It is true that they did not change the world into a place in which Israelis and pro-Palestinian activists hold hands and sing “Kumbaya,” but that’s not a realistic expectation, nor a promise Erdan or those who followed him ever made. It’s also true that not all forms of delegitimization can be addressed effectively by the Israeli government.
The BDS movement still exists, but it is nowhere near the flashpoint it was in 2015, when one musical artist after the other refused to perform in Israel, there was a vote in FIFA on a boycott and Orange, the telecom company, withdrew from doing business in Israel.
THERE ARE other related problems that need to be addressed, such as the hostile environment for Jews – especially for those who openly support Israel – on Western college campuses, and growing social movements – like Black Lives Matter and others – that delegitimize Israel and blame the Jewish state for ills taking place thousands of miles away.
There is also the argument leveled by prominent critics of the ministry on the Left that it does not need to exist, because if Israel retreats from Judea and Samaria, then the problem will go away. This is belied not only by history – Arab boycotts of Jews took place before the State of Israel was even established, not just after 1967 – but by the statements of the BDS movement’s leaders. BDS founder Omar Barghouti has said the movement “oppose[s] a Jewish state in any part of Palestine.” Perhaps certain Israeli security policies have been used by those who delegitimize to advance their cause, but the idea that withdrawing to pre1967 lines would mean delegitimization would go away is clearly false.
It’s also fashionable to say that the Strategic Affairs Ministry was a money pit that government funding went into and nothing came out of it, but that is not true, in light of what it did. Still, the ministry made the mistake of making its budget opaque in its early years, saying that the anti-Israel organizations it was fighting would use the information. More transparency would have been better from the get-go because Israelis have the right to know where their taxes are going.
The more pertinent criticism is one that Lapid leveled over the years that it was structurally flawed and therefore wasted money. Lapid has argued that a separate ministry is not necessary for the job that the Strategic Affairs Ministry was doing and that it would work better if it were done by the Foreign Ministry since there is overlap between both ministries and even also between those two and the Prime Minister’s Office.
That is a fair argument since the Foreign Ministry’s diplomats were often on the frontlines pushing back against delegitimization around the world. If they could work synergistically with those in Jerusalem doing the research on anti-Israel organizations’ funding and their fake social media accounts, they would probably be more effective.
Deputy Foreign Minister Idan Roll is responsible for finding a way to integrate the Strategic Affairs Ministry into the Foreign Ministry, and this could be the right way to move forward. While there are good structural and budgetary reasons to shut down the Strategic Affairs Ministry, the government should find a way to allow the people who did a good job there in recent years – pushing back against the delegitimization of Israel – to continue their valuable work.