People and Politics / When the attorney general ignored his own rules

Nobody knows how many hundreds of millions missing shekels slipped through the holes in the coffers of the local authorities in recent years, into disreputable hands through what is known euphemistically as "support of public institutions."

According to state comptroller reports, that fat line in the budgets of some local authorities could have fed quite a few families of city workers who have meanwhile been driven to poverty.

An official letter from the former attorney general, Elyakim Rubinstein, who consulted with his heir, Menachem Mazuz, shows that for the last four years the former attorney general and his former deputy, who is now attorney general, did not do their job and put an end to what they called "grave flaws in the procedures for granting support" to public institutions, meaning non profit organizations.

The letter accuses the interior ministers of the least three years of deliberately ignoring a government decision meant to put an end to the corruption and the distortions in the monies handed out.

The shtetl rules that the local authorities adopted when it comes to distributing public money to NPOs have often come to the attention of the High Court of Justice. While they were handing down decisions against local authorities and the state regarding the procedures for distributing money, the heads of the country's legal system did not give the court an extremely important document relevant to the matters at hand.

Attorney Gilad Barnea, until recently a Jerusalem city councillor specializing in petitions against the city for its discriminatory policies against secular NPOs in the capital, discovered government decision 838 by accident. The January 2000 decision leaves no room for doubt. The local authorities, with the attorney general's knowledge and permission, use a faulty procedure to distribute money to public institutions.

Decision 838 required the director-general of the Interior Ministry to consult with the director-general of the Prime Minister's Office, the registrar of NPOs, the accountant general, the Union of Local Authorities and the state comptroller's department in the Prime Minister's Office, to prepare within the following three months (by April 2000) new rules and procedures for distributing monies to NPOs.

The new regulations were supposed to include uniform criteria for support and methods for routine examination and inspection of how the funds were used. To remove any doubt, the decision said that was meant to guarantee that the rules governing such disbursement of funds to NPOs would be required in all local authorities within the coming budget year, meaning since January 2001.

Ten months went by, and Rubinstein sent a letter, after consulting with Mazuz, to the director-general of the Interior Minister, complaining bitterly that the ministry was tardy with the formulation of the new regulations and was not fulfilling the instructions embodied in the January 2000 Decision 838 to report within a month about progress in preparing the new regulations.

"Apparently it is no longer possible to enable disbursement of public funds according to current rules, which are so flawed and lacking any uniform criteria," wrote Rubinstein, proposing the ministry inform the local authorities that "they must cease procedures meant to grant financial support according to current rules" and warning that if matters reach the court, he "feared" it would be "difficult to justify what is being done."

According to the Interior Ministry, it did come up with a set of procedures for financial support and passed the regulations to the Justice Ministry for its approval. But the Justice Ministry has yet to do so, to this very day. In other words, for two years a procedure that the attorney general emphasized was so very necessary for equitable, clean disbursement of public monies, has been stalled in his own office.

The Justice Ministry took several days to respond to questions about this matter and explained that the preparation of the new rules is a very complicated matter and is underway right now, due to be completed in the near future, "and there is no need to say that it was impossible to cease the support by local authorities for education, health and cultural affairs until the new rules are implemented," which of course is the precise opposite of what Rubinstein instructed the director-general of the Interior Ministry.

The Justice Ministry spokesman interprets Decision 838 to mean that the local authorities do not have to avoid supporting NPOs until the rules are changed, and adds that the local authorities are entitled to determine their own rules for disbursing monies - and there has never been an intention to change that.

Therefore, the Justice Ministry says there was never any reason to claim that crucial information was hid from the High Court of Justice regarding petitions about the procedures for granting funds to NPOs.

No man is an Eiland

Israel's National Security Adviser Giora Eiland, who has been put in charge of the disengagement plan, is in good company. His American counterpart, Condoleezza Rice, also hasn't got a clue where Ariel Sharon is going.

People who have lately met with Dov Weisglass, the prime minister's right-hand man, are reminded of what Sharon once said about Benjamin Netanyahu, when the finance minister was prime minister. "His left hand doesn't know what his right hand is doing."

No wonder one newspaper runs as its lead headline that Sharon plans to leave the Palestinians scorched earth when he leaves Gaza's settlements, and the competing newspaper says he plans to hand over the settlements in an organized fashion to the Palestinians. The chance that one of those headlines is what Sharon has in mind is identical to the chance that it turns out to be nonsense.

Once can learn something about the confusion in the Prime Minister's Office in the way the government ministries that have been asked to help prepare the disengagement plan are using experts who prepared the maps for former prime minister Ehud Barak in the negotiations for a permanent agreement.

And Baruch Spiegel, who was enlisted in the effort to examine the route of the fence and the deployment of the checkpoints (it has already been decided to remove nearly all the internal checkpoints inside the West Bank), is spending many hours at Yossi Beilin's think tank, where the Geneva Accord is promoted.

It turns out that the talented officer Eiland also has to guess what's going on in between Sharon's ears. That information should be fit into the puzzle that includes the domestic political constraints, the demographic reality and the physical and geographic conditions on the ground. Those elements should be combined with the messages coming from Washington, and the Foreign Ministry's assessments about the American position on the disengagement plan.

The message brought from Weisglass to Jerusalem from Washington is that Bush is ready to forget the road map, but there's no way the president is ready to read in the New York Times that Sharon has turned his famous vision into a false presentation. That means that Sharon's great dream, that Bush will lie down on his eastern fence, is a dream.

The completion of the "Bantustein plan" that would turn the two-state vision into a five-state vision (one state of Israel and four separate Palestinian Bantustans) will have to wait for better days, like after Bush wins reelection to the presidency.

On the other hand, the public opinion polls in the U.S. point to the distinct possibility that Sharon will have to give up his special status as a sublet tenant in the White House. Sen. John Kerry, the Democrats' favorite, has announced that if elected, he would name Bill Clinton as a special envoy to the Middle East.

For his part, Clinton has said that his only indecision about the matter is whether the solution he prefers to our conflict is going to be achieved through the Ayalon-Nusseibeh plan or the Geneva Accord.

The better Kerry's position, the greater Sharon's appetite for a deal with Bush. He knows that in the U.S. agreements made with outgoing administrations are kept by incoming administrations.

Sharon's problem is that he hasn't decided what exactly he wants, and Bush's advisers are trying to keep him away from any meetings that smack of the Middle East.

Forget about it

Infrastructure Minister Yosef Paritzky says that Sharon did not consult with him before informing the nation of the Israeli population's disengagement from the Palestinian population, about whether it would be possible to disengage the water, electricity, sewage and energy infrastructures of the two nations.

Paritzky says that if Sharon had asked, the infrastructure minister would have proposed forgetting about a two infrastructures for two nations solution.

Nature does not know anything about borders, nor do barbed wire and concrete walls make much of an impression on it.

If the Palestinians pump water from the aquifer in the hills in the Nablus area, they'll dry up the Israeli coast. Bethlehem's sewage department could change the color of phosphates of the Dead Sea. Unilateral disengagement will enable any electrician's apprentice to send the settlements back to the days of generators.

If Sharon had asked, for example, for an opinion on the electrical relations between the two nations, Paritzky could have handed over an up-to-date paper, written by Yigael Ben Aryeh, the veteran chief of the Jerusalem District in the Israel Electric Corporation, who is also in charge of supplying electricity to the West Bank.

"The Israeli and Palestinian electricity networks are integrated and cannot be disconnected," he says. Separating them would be a "catastrophe."

In the foreseeable future, he explained, it will be impossible to disconnect the network that provides electricity to Palestinian communities from the network that provides electricity to the settlements and even to some of the towns up against the western side of the Green Line.

"Electrical independence for the Palestinian Authority is an unrealistic solution for the medium term, as well," Ben Aryeh writes. "In the existing system, it can not meet the current needs ... and certainly not future needs."

Ben Aryeh sums up by saying that removing electricity from the conflict and providing electricity to all customers, without discrimination, during the intifada, created a basis of trust between the sides, preventing sabotage of the network. That unusual example of cooperation shows what would happen if the electrical networks are disconnected and electricity, water and sewage is added to the conflict.

	KERRY: Send in Clinton.