By agreement between the State of Israel and the Zionist organization, the State has abdicated to the organization its role in organizing immigration, absorbing the immigrants, setting up new agricultural settlements and supporting the old ones. These immense operations are conducted, even today in Israel, by the Jewish Agency.
Thus parties controlling the Zionist organization can manipulate vast amounts of money independent of ordinary democratic processes and controls. Small wonder indeed that to all these parties Zionism is sacred. The Establishment could not possibly exist without it. The idea of a non-Zionist Israel is to them heresy, mortal sin.
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The relationship between the parties and the government is not very different, even while subject to far stricter controls.
The Israeli economy, for example, is run as few others. It is a system which, in my view, resembles neither capitalism nor socialism, but is a unique creation. No general plan exists, as in a planned socialist economy, nor is there private initiative, as in an advanced capitalistic society. Instead, the government exerts absolute power over all economic activity by a very sophisticated system of controlled credit, permits, licenses, quotas, subsidies, taxation, currency control, and so forth, without any central planning board; no such board exists. Many people got rich in Israel, but not one without the government's wanting him to. Private entrepreneurs, especially Jews from abroad, can win incredible conditions for new enterprises. In some notorious cases, charlatans received from the government, in grants and loans, much more than the entire amount invested in the enterprises. But every activity is dependent upon some government support or intervention, given or withheld without objective rules, and without recourse to appeal.
There is an explanation for this capricious system.