Jerusalem, September 23 – An audit by the State Comptroller has revealed that the Ministry of the Interior has apparently been misunderstanding its mission, and has restricted itself to managing home and office decor when its actual mandate involves local government, citizenship and residency, issuing identity cards, and the various types of entry visas. Minister of the Interior Gidon Sa’ar has promised a thorough investigation to address the oversight.
The report, issued this week, details the many areas that have been neglected by successive ministers of the interior and their staff who misunderstood the name of the office as referring only to the literal interior of buildings. In fact, it says, there are nine major areas of the ministry’s responsibility, only one of which, involving building codes, can be construed as remotely related to interior design.
The report authors issued a scathing treatment of the ministry, calling its neglect of firefighting and rescue services especially reprehensible. “It is inconceivable that the ministry supposedly tasked with training, equipping, and overseeing such crucial aspects of citizen safety instead spends its time choosing color schemes and sponsoring Feng Shui classes for its employees,” read part of its conclusion. The slow and inadequate response of Israeli firefighters to various blazes has received much attention since the disastrous Carmel Forest fire of 2010.
Citizens have complained for decades about the ministry’s inattention to important matters under its aegis, such as the issuing of travel documents and the registration of births. Clerks in the various branches of the ministry operated entirely without guidance, adhering to Byzantine regulations and procedures as their superiors ignored their requests, for example, to install actual technology to handle their tasks. The superiors consistently thought there had been some mistake, and assumed their underlings realized they had the wrong people and solved their problems somehow, which left the clerks and their immediate supervisors to their own devices in handling throngs of frustrated visitors clamoring for visas, birth certificates, passports, and other crucial documentation.
The superiors did, however, visit those facilities to ascertain interior decorating needs, and in the 1990’s installed a take-a-number system to fit with the overall malaise appropriate for such spaces. Fittingly, the machines did not work, as they were purely ornamental.
Other areas neglected by the ministry include licensing the ownership of firearms, supervising local government, city councils and local councils, overseeing elections, and handling the registration and proper documentation of associations. In the absence of ministry input and oversight, the bodies handling these functions have maintained their bureaucratic morass, with personal connections achieving better and quicker results than adherence to procedure and proper filing of forms. In that respect Israel fits right into the Middle East, says report author Rosh Katan.
“It might be reassuring that we’re no worse than our neighbors, but that’s a pretty low bar,” he says. “And low bars just don’t look right with this furniture. You think if we put it over there, by the window?”
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