When Lord Acton made his famous pronouncement: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, he was not providing a warning merely about politicians, but about any accumulation of unlimited power in the hands of an authority figure. Another sentence in that same letter is less well-known: “There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it”.
For some reason, an erroneous notion has taken root in Israel, according to which only politicians tend towards corruption, and so only they are in need of checks and balances in the form of professional, unelected bodies whose word is final in any public dispute. These days we are witnessing this notion’s total collapse.
To begin with, the Histadrut (The General Federation of Labor in Israel). It is fairly certain there isn’t a single person in Israel who was surprised to hear about the recent corruption affair it is embroiled in. Labor laws in Israel are an international aberration, especially the norms established in labor courts, deliberately granting monopolistic power to strong workers’ organizations which, in their legal status as outdated Ottoman Associations, are neither obligated to transparency nor subject to democratic procedures like all other nonprofit organizations.
The heads of the labor organizations learned that their ability to harm public service grants them the power to extort various governments and demand anything that serves them, even outside the issue of salary conditions. From upgrading information systems to political struggles completely unrelated to labor, the labor courts will nearly always back them. When independent worker organizations try to compete with the large workers’ organizations for representation, labor courts explicitly support the large organizations because of their power to paralyze the economy. And with absolute power comes corruption – not only the criminal kind, but also the institutionalized, day-to-day kind that looks after the interests of powerful pressure groups at the expense of the public good.
The same process evolved in the military and civilian prosecution services. Over the years, the Military Advocate General has become the most powerful position in the IDF – as of today, everything is done by her dictates, every operation is carried out with her exclusive approval, she draws the boundaries of her own authority and operates through independent channels to eradicate any immoral phenomenon, at times outside the chain of command. Hubris grew alongside such power, together with the understanding that in order to purify the IDF from militarism, one can and even should act dishonestly; and the sense that no entity has the power to supervise her or draw her position’s boundaries.
Her civilian counterpart, the Attorney General – who insists on controlling the case of the leak and cover-up that was at the very least corrupted under her aegis – has already been defined by many as the most powerful authority in the West, the only one in the developed world whose advice is binding and whose representation is forced upon those she represents.
We have seen over and over that the more such unlimited authority has been exercised for political motives, the more public trust in the position and the person filling it has plummeted dramatically. Like Icarus, whose wings melted in the sun when he couldn’t restrain his upward flight, the arrogance of people holding positions that lack oversight will sooner or later fly too high and crash into the ground of reality. The only question is how long of a trail of corpses and wreckage they will leave in their wake until they fall.
When Montesquieu conceived the idea of the principle of separation of powers, he was not concerned only about the power of the ruler or the executive branch, but about the abuse of authority by all three branches, including the judiciary. The idea of restraining the branches of government is not unidirectional toward the executive branch; its purpose is to limit and supervise all branches, based on the understanding that absolute power corrupts any position, and that personal background or worldviews cannot be relied upon as an antidote. No background immunizes a person from the danger of corruption if they are unrestrained by institutional limitations, and set no boundaries by some authority.
It is a pity that Israeli society is forced to learn this basic lesson under such difficult circumstances, and even more of a pity that it is precisely those who sing the praises of democracy who have failed to learn its first lesson, before the term devolved into a euphemism for the rule of the righteous over the barbarians. It seems there is no escape from thoroughly redesigning the boundaries of authority for certain positions, and imposing democracy, transparency, and proper administration on both law enforcement authorities and workers’ organizations.
(First published in Hebrew in Makor Rishon)
