Israeli Water Bureaucracy

Thirty years ago I was a ranking Dept. Manager of the Municipality of Herzliya. In my times, the Water Dept. consisted in a Romanian born engineer appropriately called Abraham Wasserman and two mobile plumbers. They occupied one room in the Engineering Division floor. Sewage was in charge of a Romanian engineer by name of Ferraro and a self-effacing Russian engineer Inna Mechanik, all crowded in the next room. Ferraro had also three maintenance workers with a pump. I was in charge of the Wastewater Treatment Plant, which consisted in a lab lady, an electrician and five lazy workers that seldom were at work.

Compare that to the Water Corporation of today, which occupies two floors in a luxury building. It has a directory of about ten politically connected nobodies, that draw large salaries and car allowances and have no duties. The Corporation has an accounting dept. of about ten accountants, a water planning dept., a chief and assistant engineer in charge of approving water plans for building permits, and a parallel technical group for sewage plans, and a Vaada - a Commission in charge of approvals. The Corporation has an annual budget and annual development program, with its auditor, and a body to evaluate execution bids and contracts, and supervise the execution. They have a public relations department, producing color brochures (pic), water quality reports, organizing school visits, and so. And plenty of good-and-not-so-good looking secretaries and security men, drivers and maintenance staff. All in all some 200 employees, and they consume of hundreds of plans and reports, they maintain internal meetings when they cannot be bothered and very important coordination discussions with city bosses and national ministries. The engineers receive phone calls only twice a week for two hours each (really!) , and to program a meeting takes two weeks. They behave as effendis, freely humiliating all "petitioners" and lower ranking persons they call "clients". The whole organization is tremendously busy, although their measurable product (water and sewage) is more or less of the same quality and quantity as was managed thirty years ago by Wasserman and Ferraro in their times.

This explosion of bureaucracy is explained by Moldbug: modern societies have an overabundance of useless people that cannot be absorbed by the production system. Paying the underclass to do nothing, like in the USA, is odious for society at large and for themselves, because they see themselves as precious and educated, with their fancy university titles in math-less subjects. There is constant pressure to find occupation for this mass of voting citizens, and creating air-conditioned office jobs in a rich Water Corporation (there are more than 100 in Israel) is a viable solution. In places like India and Egypt, the government explicitly creates bureaucratic positions, to throw oil on social unrest. In Israel, I have never heard anybody explicitly proposing this policy, but that is how it is working, specifically regarding young Arabs and Oriental Jews with college diplomas that are recruited into government service.

Productivity has grown so fast that agriculture, once the main human occupation, requires less than 2% of the workforce. Factories employ only a few thousand persons in actual production. The famous Israeli start-up sector employs no more than ten thousand smart people. That leaves the vast majority of Israel's growing population irrelevant and superfluous.

Israel possesses four populations sinks for the unproductive: (1) the Armed Forces, that neutralizes three and half years of each young man's life and one month per year. A modern army, like a modern factory, needs few soldiers, and the real function of the Israeli army is to pin down potentially troublesome young people (without paying them salary) and to indoctrinate them in patriotism aka Zionism. Only a few middle class boys, like the heroes of the last Gaza operation, who were disproportionally from the high schools of Kever Benjamin city, Raanana, Hod Hasharon and Ramat Hasharon, make actual contact with the enemy. The rest are irrelevant.

(2) The education system, which consumes a third of the state's budget and creates infinite number of jobs like teaching autistics to solve puzzles and paraplegics to dance. And there are all those courses in psychology and zoogiut (couple relations). (3) The religion establishment, which maintains and  occupies thousands of doctrine instructors and mashgichim (inspectors of ritual correctness of foodstuffs). The number (4) is the State bureaucracy and regulatory systems, which occupy about a third (my estimate) of the salaried population and cost about half of the GNP.