4% of Voters Do a 100% Demolition Job : Israel: Shamir’s reliance on extremist minority parties was his coalition’s undoing; the country needs a popularly elected leader.

The collapse of the Israeli government is yet another symptom of the Jewish state’s political disease: having an unruly, oversized and ultimately weak form of government. If Israel hopes to cope with the severe crises on its horizon, its political structure must be reformed.

Under the current, British-model system, the public votes for parties, which send representatives to the Knesset, where the prime minister must form a government from the parties that supported him. Consequently, the prime minister is held hostage by a plethora of marginal parties and insubordinate individuals whose conditions for continuing their support are usually sectarian or personal.

That is how two far-right parties, which together represent a scant 4% of the electorate, toppled Yitzhak Shamir’s coalition government because of their opposition to the peace process, which 80% of Israelis support.

Fringe groups, light-years away from the political mainstream, control government agencies, misuse public funds, abuse public office, erode the prime minister’s authority and distract the entire government from long-term planning.

The Knesset Finance Committee is chaired by one Rabbi Moshe Feldman, who has never attended a college course or managed a business. “My grandmother taught me basic math, and that should suffice,” he said of his credentials for the job of shaping the country’s public spending. While the government legitimately supports religious institutions, Feldman has used his position to funnel millions of dollars to some that are opposed to Israel’s existence on theological grounds.

In his cabinet, the prime minister has mavericks who relentlessly undermine his work. Housing Minister Ariel Sharon never misses an opportunity to defy his boss. Yet Shamir doesn’t fire Sharon, who, in his capacity as legislator, can damage Shamir’s parliamentary base. Thus the prime minister must tolerate a cabinet member whom he can neither digest nor vomit, in a position of increasingly volatile importance.

After the disloyal come the incompetent. Consider the most crucial function in the Israeli government today: immigrant absorption. There are in Israel plenty of experienced administrators and visionary Zionists who would have done wonders if given a chance to lead the absorption effort. But the minister of absorption is Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz, a religious fanatic whose administrative inexperience is dooming him, and Israel, to colossal failure at a precious historical moment.

Why Rabbi Peretz? He saved Shamir’s career when he refused to join a Labor-led coalition; Shamir owes Peretz his political life. Go explain that to unemployed Russian immigrants.

Israel’s government is a spoils system, ever-expanding as the political demands of maintaining a coalition grow more complex. Road construction, for instance, a traditionally rich source of jobs, is done by four ministries (housing, transportation, defense and interior).

In addition to the usual government functions, there is a ministry for religious affairs--a bureaucracy created to peek over the citizen’s shoulder during circumcision, marriage and burial.

Likud’s election promises included the dismantling of ministries; instead, new ones were added, such as the ministry for economic planning and the ministry of science. Established a decade ago to give two newly appointed members of the cabinet something to do, these utterly superfluous agencies are now as solidly planted in the Israeli landscape as Masada.

Universities, high schools, hospitals, the navigation company, the bus company, the phone company, the radio stations, the airline, even the banks in Israel are government-owned or subsidized.

The tunnel vision that created all this political booty has made Israelis the most heavily taxed people in the world and the least prosperous Jews in the West.

Israeli leaders are perpetually busy securing their parliamentary majority and satisfying the whims of small-party hacks. They have little time for the long-term planning that should be tackling such problems as the poor transportation infrastructure. Far more Israelis die in highway accidents than are killed by acts of terrorism.

There is a reform movement, one of the few nonpartisan endeavors in Israel. It includes left-wing Shimon Peres and super-hawk Raphael Eitan. They, and a vast majority of the citizenry, realize that only a popularly elected premier, whose commitment will be primarily and directly to mainstream voters, will have the maneuvering space necessary for bold domestic and foreign-policy moves.

A bill for a direct election of the premier was defeated recently by a narrow and shameless Knesset majority, consisting of the bacteria of Israel’s political decay, the parliamentarians who benefit from the present system’s deformities. They were led by Shamir himself who, some say, feared that direct elections would lead to his replacement by someone more charismatic, like reform champions Yitzhak Rabin and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Before long, reform will win the day. Israel will have a strong premier, maybe also separation of government and legislature, a constitution and regionally elected legislators.

Until then, we Israelis and those who deal with us will have to cope with more of the same.