Tag Archives: Israel

Does Corruption Flourish in a “Culture of Corruption”?

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A common intuition about corruption is that individuals are more likely to engage in corruption when they witness others committing corrupt acts without facing serious consequences—in other words, a “culture of corruption” can be self-perpetuating (see here and here), and the perception or belief that corruption is widespread can itself be a cause of corruption. While compelling, this intuition has not been subjected to much empirical scrutiny. While there does seem to be some evidence of an association between individuals’ perceptions of the prevalence of domestic corruption and those individuals’ inclination to act corruptly, the research on this topic is relatively thin.

In a recent paper, a group of academics (Israel Waismel-Manor, Patricia Moy, Rico Neumann, and Moran Shechnick) weighed in, presenting the results of a controlled lab experiment that sought to assess whether news about corruption by public officials affected individuals’ incentives to behave dishonestly. The study was conducted in Israel, and participants were required first to watch a short television news segment. The treatment group’s segment revolved around an Israeli mayor suspected of certain corrupt acts, while the control group’s segment was unrelated to corruption. The participants were also given a short quiz about the segment they’d seen, and half of the participants in each group were offered a monetary reward if they answered all the questions correctly; they were told “to answer all questions from memory” and not look anything up on the internet. However, unbeknownst to the participants, one of the questions could not be answered without doing additional searches, so the researchers could use the answer to this question to identify those participants who cheated on the test. The real goal of the study (of which participants were not aware) was to see whether exposure to the corruption news story (alone or in combination with the financial incentive) affected participants’ likelihood of cheating.

Unsurprisingly, participants who were offered money for answering all questions correctly cheated far more often, regardless of which news story they watched. The study’s authors seem to have expected that those participants who watched the corruption-related story would also cheat more (holding constant whether they had financial incentives to answer questions correctly). But this did not occur: Participants who watched the news segment involving a mayor suspected of corruption did not cheat in statistically significantly higher rates than those who watched the other, unrelated-to-corruption segment. The researchers suggested that perhaps the reason was that Israelis had been inundated with so much news about official corruption around the time of the experiment (which took place in 2019), particularly in connection with the investigation and prosecution of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior politicians (see here, here, and here), that the marginal impact of exposure to additional news about corruption, in the form of this one story, would not have much impact.

While that explanation is plausible, I have some other concerns about the research’s design and methodology, which make me question whether this experiment was in fact a good way to assess the “culture of corruption” hypothesis.

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The More You Know About Chief Prosecutors, the Less You Trust Their Office?

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Prosecuting elected officials for corruption is often an uphill battle. The power and resources of the defendants, combined with the general difficulty of proving corrupt deeds (which usually happen behind closed doors), make it difficult to secure convictions. Moreover, prosecutors who bring charges against elected officials frequently face accusations that the decision to prosecute was politically motivated or biased. Such accusations, which are often fueled by the politicians themselves, have potential grave consequences. Not only can they result in public distrust in particular criminal proceedings against politicians, but also—and perhaps more importantly—these accusations can undermine the legitimacy of the legal system more broadly.

Some public criticism—fair or unfair—of prosecutors is inevitable. However, prosecutors can (and should) try to minimize the harmful effects such criticism might have on the overall legitimacy of the institutions of justice. How can they do so? In a recent and highly recommended article, Ori Aronson, Julia Elad-Strenger, Thomas Kessler, and Yuval Feldman suggest that one way prosecutors can increase the perception that their offices and investigations are objective and unbiased is by refraining from highlighting the personal traits or biographical details of the individuals who lead those offices. To use the jargon of the authors, “non-personalization” of prosecutors’ offices is superior to their “personalization,” at least in terms of offices’ perceived objectivity. The authors base this conclusion on a series of experiments involving reactions to decisions made by Israel’s head of prosecution—former Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit—concerning the corruption allegations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (a topic that was featured on the blog numerous times; see, for example, here, here, and here).

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Corruption, Extremism, and the Crisis in Israel: Some Tentative Thoughts on Possible Connections

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Since the terrorist organization Hamas’s mass murder and kidnapping of Israeli civilians ten days ago, I’ve been finding it difficult to think about anything other than the news from Israel/Palestine. Like many of you, I’ve been spending a lot of time (probably too much) doom-scrolling, worrying about my friends in the region, and anxious about about what will happen next. A lot of people, including university professors and those who have public platforms of some kind, have been weighing in on various aspects of this conflict. I have been hesitant to do so, because I have basically no professional expertise in the most important dimensions of the current crisis (such as the politics and history of the Middle East, military strategy, international humanitarian law and the law of war, etc.). What I write about on this platform is corruption, and the current crisis in Israel has little to do with corruption.

Little, but not nothing. At the risk of engaging in an all-too-common form of academic narcissism (“Look how this biggest important news event relates to the narrow topic I happen to study!”), I did want to offer some brief and tentative thoughts on how corruption, and the response to it, may have played a minor but notable role in precipitating the current crisis.

I’m not going to say much here about corruption on the Palestinian side. In an insightful post from back in June 2021, GAB contributor Magd Lhroob addressed aspects of this issue, noting both how Hamas’s initial electoral success back in 2006 may have had more to do with the perception that the Palestinian Authority (PA) was hopelessly corrupt, and also how the growing frustration of ordinary Gaza residents at Hamas’s corruption strengthens Hamas’s incentives to foment violence with Israel. Here I want to say a few words about corruption issues on the Israeli side, particularly the corruption charges against Prime Minister Netanyahu. Continue reading →

How Regulatory Gaps in National Security Create Corruption – A Closer Look at Israel’s 8200 Unit

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While much of the discussion of corruption focuses on traditional, illegal acts like embezzlement and bribery, other shadowy, nominally legal practices can contribute to corruption, and perhaps should be considered corrupt themselves. An important manifestation of this phenomenon is the pipeline between government military intelligence services and the private intelligence industry. Though this is an issue in many countries, Israel’s 8200 unit provides a useful and especially salient example.

Founded in 1952, Israel’s 8200 unit conducts intelligence and cybersecurity operations, as well as cyber warfare. It is consistently recognized as one of the world’s most effective intelligence units. Unfortunately, the Israeli government does not regulate what its former soldiers do with their skills and expertise. As a result, many 8200 veterans go on to develop technologies for private intelligence and to found or work for private intelligence companies like Psy Group, Black Cube, Mitiga, and NSO Group, to name just a few. 

While many people believe that these private firms need to be more tightly regulated, it may not be immediately apparent why this issue relates to corruption specifically. While employed by the 8200 unit, Israel’s soldiers are not abusing their entrusted public responsibility for private financial gain—to the contrary, they are working for the public’s safety and security. And while they do seek private financial gain after they leave government service, and to market the special skills and experience they gained while in the military, this is not on its face that different from how any number of former public servants go on to monetize their government-acquired expertise in the private sector.

But there are at least two respects in which the public-private pipeline in the context of the 8200 unit, or intelligence services more generally, is of particular concern for anticorruption advocates:

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To Cut Corruption in the Palestinian Authority, Cut Off Development Aid

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Foreign development aid plays a unique role in the lives of Palestinians, as aid is the “main driver” of growth in the Palestinian economy. For this reason, many people welcomed the Biden Administration’s announcement in April to reverse the Trump Administration’s decision to halt all development aid to Palestinians. Yet widespread corruption in the Palestinian Authority (PA)—which remains the principal recipient of aid to Palestinians—threatens to undermine the effectiveness of aid. Worse, foreign aid to the PA helps perpetuate and exacerbate the PA’s culture of corruption.

Corruption in the PA is deeply entrenched. To illustrate with just a handful of many possible examples: There are allegations that the PA has embezzled development aid money from the European Union. There are reports that the PA spent staggering sums on fake companies and projects, including a non-existent airline. But there are also documented examples of corrupt use of funds. Rather than develop welfare programs to distribute social services or development aid money to the public, the PA allocates the money to salary payouts for security officers and government officials in job placements secured by cronyism. High-ranking PA officials regularly establish their own NGOs and phony companies to attract additional funds from aid programs. Yet for the most part donors have turned a blind eye to the PA’s blatant corruption and mismanagement of development funds. Consequently, despite more than US$15 billion in development aid given to Palestinians in the past thirty years, that aid has failed to reduce poverty or deliver sustainable improvements in ordinary Palestinians’ quality of life.

And it’s not just that the PA’s corruption undermines the effectiveness of aid. Perhaps the even bigger problem is that the flow of development aid contributes to and props up the PA’s culture of large-scale corruption. The more funding the PA can access, the more powerful it becomes, and the more capable it is of embezzling funds and extorting bribes from its populace. Worse still, the costs of the corruption that the aid to the PA fuels are not merely economic costs: In Palestine, corruption contributes to needless violence, political radicalization, and, ultimately, the loss of innocent lives.

The only way to break out of this malignant cycle is for donors to call a halt to unfettered development aid to Palestinian government institutions, which have proven themselves time and again to be too weak and unscrupulous to handle aid without corruption.

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A Closer Look at Corruption, Hamas, and Violence in the Gaza Strip

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The recent violent clash between Israel and Hamas followed a pattern that has become depressingly familiar since Hamas won control of the Gaza Strip in 2006: Hamas instigates violence towards Israel and its civilians; Israel responds with military strikes targeting Hamas’s weaponry infrastructure, but since Hamas has intentionally embedded itself in Gaza’s civilian population, Israel’s strikes inevitably claim innocent lives. The question whether Israel’s response was proportional or excessive saturates the news and media. Eventually the two sides reach a tentative ceasefire, the violence subsides, and attention turns elsewhere—until the vicious cycle repeats.

Most readers, whatever their views on the underlying moral and legal issues, are likely familiar with this pattern. But what does this have to do with corruption? Quite a bit, actually. 

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A Media Advisor-Client Privilege Would Be Inimical to Anticorruption in Israel

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The ongoing corruption trial of Israel’s Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu (who stepped down as Israel’s Prime Minister in mid-June 2021 after 12 consecutive years of service, replaced by Naftali Bennett), as well as the investigations that took place before it, have triggered a wide variety of legislative reform proposals. Members of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) who oppose Netanyahu have proposed bills that would prevent individuals with sufficiently serious prior criminal convictions from serving as the Prime Minister (which Netanyahu is planning on trying to do again), or bar certain criminal defendants from running for Israel’s Presidency (which some had formerly speculated Netanyahu may do). Knesset members from Netanyahu’s Likud Party, on the other hand, have pushed to bolster protections for criminal suspects and defendants, especially elected officials. For example, Likud members have proposed bills that would prohibit some forms of recording of public servants, or make it more difficult for the prosecution to appeal acquittals.

The fact that the criminal proceeding against Netanyahu has relied in substantial part on the incriminating key testimony of Netanyahu’s former media advisor (who became a “state’s witness” in 2018) is the likely (though not explicit) motivation for another recently proposed bill that would establish a “media advisor-client privilege,” according to which “matters and documents exchanged between a media advisor or a spokesperson and his [or her] client [] and which have a material relation to the services provided” could not be submitted as evidence unless the client waived this privilege. In other words, media advisors or spokespersons would generally be barred from testifying against their clients. The bill’s drafters argue that a media advisor-client privilege is justified for reasons similar to that of an attorney-client privilege—the need for “complete openness” between clients and their media advisors or spokespersons.

The impulse to resist the proposed media advisor-client privilege is understandable, given its seemingly blatant relationship to Netanyahu’s trial and the fact that its protection would be afforded to a very narrow class of powerful and wealthy criminal defendants. However, even though we should sometimes resist the impulse to oppose criminal justice reforms whose proponents have questionable motives, in this case even when considered independently from its problematic context, the proposal for media advisor-client privilege raises at least three strong anticorruption concerns that warrant its rejection:

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A Mandatory Reporting Requirement in Israel: Maybe Not a Lost Hope?

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In my last post, I discussed and critiqued a proposal, advanced in a policy paper published by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), for a mandatory reporting requirement in Israel’s public sector. Under the IDI paper’s proposal, a public official who, acting in his or her official capacity, formed a “substantial suspicion” that corruption has taken place or will take place could face disciplinary sanctions for failing to report this suspected corruption “as soon as possible.” I criticized this proposal on the grounds that it would both discourage reporting in those cases where a potential whistleblower is reluctant to report right away and so delays for a period of time, and would also deter employees from cooperating with investigators by sharing relevant information that they had not previously disclosed. In both of these cases—the employee who didn’t report right away but might be willing to report later, and the employee who didn’t voluntarily report but might be willing to share information when questioned by investigators—the threat of disciplinary sanctions for failure to report immediately may actually induce employees to keep silent, especially since the chances they will be caught and punished if they never reveal what they suspected are generally quite low. Instead of imposing a mandatory reporting requirement, I argued, Israel (and similarly situated countries) should strengthen positive incentives for whistleblowers, offering them more generous rewards and more effective protections against retaliation.

While many readers broadly agreed with my critique of the IDI paper’s mandatory reporting proposal in its current form, several colleagues suggested that a modified version of the mandatory reporting requirement might be effective and appropriate. In this post, I consider what seem to me the most plausible and promising revisions to the original IDI proposal, and evaluate whether these modifications would overcome my principal critiques: Continue reading →

Why Mandatory Corruption Reporting Requirements May Prove Counterproductive

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Whistleblowers who report on and expose illegal acts in their workplaces are invaluable to fighting corruption. In Israel, as I stressed in a previous post, the recognition of the importance of whistleblowers has led to the adoption of several (unsatisfactory) legal instruments which are designed to encourage whistleblowers to step forward. These instruments are mainly about rewarding or protecting those employees who have dared to report on illegalities despite the personal and professional risks associated with their coming forward. An important example of such a positive instrument is Israel’s Protection of Workers (Exposure of Offenses and of Harm to Integrity or to Proper Administration) Law,  which establishes a whistleblower-friendly mechanism for seeking damages from employers who engage in unlawful retaliation .

But some argue that positive incentives are insufficient. In 2019, the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), one of the country’s leading research institutes, published a policy paper in which the authors (Professor Mordechai Kremnitzer and Yazid Ershied) argued that negative incentives—that is, the threat of sanctions for those who fail to report corruption in their workplaces—should also be employed. More specifically, the authors propose that Israel’s disciplinary law include a provision that requires any public employee who, in his or her official capacity, has formed a “substantial suspicion” that an act of corruption has taken place to report on it “as soon as possible” to a newly established governmental unit which would address corruption in the public sector. The authors claim that adoption of such a mandatory reporting requirement, if backed by the credible threat of sanctions, would increase the number of reports by public officials who observe corruption. (The sanctions recommended by the authors would be disciplinary rather than criminal, as criminal sanctions in their view would be disproportionate and consequently ineffective.)

The IDI paper is the most thorough and impressive piece written on proposals to adopt a mandatory reporting requirement on corruption in Israel. But while the authors list some good reasons for adopting such a requirement, they fail to consider how their proposal would interact with the phenomenon of “delayed reporting.” Employees are often reluctant to report suspected corruption right away, but eventually become willing to report it. In other words, for entirely understandable reasons, it often takes whistleblowers some time and contemplation before they are finally ready to report on illegalities. When one takes this fact into account, it becomes apparent that the IDI paper’s proposed mandatory reporting requirement might prove counterproductive, for two reasons: Continue reading →

Anticorruption Court Rulings as a Gentle Reminder to Voters: Candidates’ Integrity Is Important

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One of the great paradoxes in the research on corruption in democracies—and one of the great sources of frustration for anticorruption activists—is that while large majorities of voters consistently claim that they detest corruption and would be less likely to support corrupt politicians, nonetheless politicians credibly accused of corruption regularly win elections. There are many possible explanations for this, including the possibilities that voters lack sufficient information about corruption allegations against candidates, or that voters ultimately prioritize other factors. Yet another possibility—similar to yet distinct from these familiar explanations—is that even if voters are generally aware of corruption allegations against certain politicians, when the time comes to vote, other issues are more salient in many citizens’ minds, and integrity concerns fade into the background.

That last explanation implies that if concerns about politicians’ integrity were made more salient shortly before the election—even if the focus was on political corruption generally, or on corruption in some other jurisdiction—then voters would be less inclined to support politicians suspected of corruption. In a recent article, titled Can Institutions Make Voters Care about Corruption?, Omer Yair, Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan, and Yoav Dotan find that this may indeed be the case, and further suggest that if high-profile institutions—such as courts—take actions that raise the salience of corruption and integrity issues shortly before an election, this can lead voters to place more weight on such considerations when casting their ballots. Continue reading →