Prologue (1)

Astrologers believe that when the stars above are aligned in specific and sometimes rare configurations, their influence can be felt on earth and great events may occur. 

We in the policy "business" know better. It is not the stars that affect our lives or effect great events, but hard work. Sometimes years are required -- patience and persistence, research and presentations -- and even then, the configuration is sometimes not complete until a politician "appears." 

While the word "appears" implies fate, in reality policy people, and independent researchers, must identify such a politician, one who knows the difference between politics and policy (see the Comments of the President in our last Quarterly), and one who is both courageous enough and also determined enough to proceed on the basis of his knowledge and this difference.  

Raanan Cohen is one such politician. He is chairman of the Israeli Labor Party. He is now a minister without portfolio in the Sharon-led national unity government. During the many long years of Oslo, even during the early ideological euphoria of Oslo, when other Labor leaders were making pilgrimages to the future lynching-site of Ramallah and the Judenrein city of Gaza to be photographed with Arafat, Raanan Cohen was, in his words, "too busy" in the Knesset for such religious enthusiasm. It is difficult to know whether Cohen's words are spiced with irony or straightforward. To be sure, he neither repudiated nor distanced himself from Oslo -- though it is doubtful he ever found time for those photo ops with Arafat. 

Raanan Cohen has not passed many private-member's bills in the Knesset. But each of the three or four he has passed has changed the lives of all Israeli citizens. Again, to be sure, not all have been market oriented. The Labor Party is a socialist party and Raanan Cohen is its chairman. Yet what distinguished Cohen's bills were his preparation of and reliance on research to investigate the need for and/or probable effects of his work, and the scope of these laws he has enacted. 

Prologue (2) 

IASPS Koret Fellow Bar Dadon completed Policy Studies No. 40, "The Need for an Economic Model for the Israeli Reserve System," in July 1999. On its publication, the Israeli press gave extensive coverage to this first attempt at researching the cost of the system used to draft reservists into military service. The study estimated the costs both to Israeli businessmen and to the Israeli economy as a whole.  

Interest in the study did not wane after the initial press coverage. In the two years that have passed since the study's publication, a steady stream of telephone calls has come into IASPS-Jerusalem on the subject. Bar Dadon, no longer a Koret Fellow, now an economist in the private sector and a Teaching Fellow at IASPS, has been invited to make presentations to various officials and offices on the economic model with which she proposed replacing the current costly reserve system.  

This isn't the first time IASPS policy analysts have been catalysts for reform -- the dairy sector, the cement industry, taxicab service -- have all been reformed to various extents by research published by IASPS. Bar Dadon was herself the catalyst for reforming the auto-insurance industry, and as a Koret Fellow she testified before the Knesset on the harm being done by the state-backed auto-insurance cartel. Because of the delicate nature of the current subject, dealing with military matters, neither IASPS nor Dadon speak publicly about the ongoing interest in her study.

The Past is Prologue 

No one disputes the security burden currently being borne by Israel in this latest war with the Arabs. One of the questions that the policy community on the whole, excepting IASPS, has chosen to ignore, is the economic aspect of the burden. Is Israeli security being enhanced by forcing the army to pay between three and six times as much as it needs for reserve soldiers? Is Israel made stronger by a system that causes losses to the economy of hundreds of millions of dollars? Are Israeli reservists functioning at the best of their ability when they are plucked from their jobs, underpaid and used in capacities for which they are not suited? 

In April 2001, patience, research, hard work, politicans and policy -- and IASPS and the Koret Fellowship Program -- came together. 

Raanan Cohen had been at the forefront of a years-long fight to ease the burden on Israelis who serve in the reserves and to compensate them for their service. In the wake of the latest war in Israel, the military now announced plans to lengthen reservists' terms of duty and postpone their discharge age. IASPS Koret Fellow Daniela Green is working with Minister Raanan Cohen. She had read Bar Dadon's Policy Studies. Raanan Cohen expressed interest. Green researched and updated Dadon's 1999 study. Cohen received the numbers and economic data that proved his contentions. Cohen took the matter to the cabinet. 

Now, according to press reports, a plan conceived by a 25-year-old IASPS Koret Fellow, Bar Dadon, in conjunction with the Institute's Jerusalem director Zev Golan, honed by then mentor to the Fellows Yossi Laster, under the supervision of DEPR director Alvin Rabushka and with the guidance of  Robert J. Loewenberg, and presented by yet another 25-year-old Fellow, Daniela Green, was now being discussed across the cabinet table with the prime minister. 

Cohen put honesty above Party and gave credit where credit is due, and he is quoted in Israel's financial daily, Globes, as attributing his data on the economic damage caused by the current system to the IASPS Policy Studies. Cohen, again basing himself on IASPS data provided by Dadon and Green, then assessed the economic costs of implementing the military's new plans, and called for their rejection. Instead, he said, he was proposing a new plan that would rationalize the military reserves. 

Cohen's assessments were the only real numbers to be used by any side in the debate over the army's plans. He was the only person to enrich the public debate with facts, with research, with considerations of what was economically viable and useful. 

Whether this government or any other will implement Cohen's plans, or the recommendations of the IASPS study, is an open question.

Perhaps the army will adopt some of the recommendations on its own, in order to save money it needs for other, more pressing expenses. It is too early to answer this question. 

What can be said with certainty, given the evidence of the past, is that Cohen is not going to give up; Green will be at his side; and she, Dadon and other Fellows and former Fellows are indeed the new, independent policy community that the IASPS Koret Fellowship Program was designed to form.

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