Innovative Policymaking Resulting from Political Pressure from Three Non-Governmental Organizations: An Israeli Case Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article presents innovative policymaking by the Israeli government regarding illegal immigration as an outcome of the activity of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Initially, government policy on this issue has been very conservative, yet poorly defined, aimed at preventing the entrance of illegal immigrants. By employing various sophisticated strategies, three NGOs exert pressure on the government to implement flexible, humanitarian policies more considerate of newcomers' needs. The article examines the influence and strategies of these NGOs, focusing on how this pressure is successfully exerted.A combination of power and network theories was used to interpret innovative government policy as an outcome of NGO pressure. This qualitative case study included documents from court records and 25 interviews. Their analysis shows that NGOs use direct hard power strategies to challenge the government directly in the High Court and indirect soft power strategies to focus public opinion on the plight of the immigrants. These strategies are effective in persuading the government to adopt more innovative policies toward the newcomers. We can apply the lesson from this case study to other government policymaking. Where policies are poorly defined and potentially embarrassing, NGOs can successfully assert pressure on the government to take innovative action. This is particularly true if a number of NGOs work collaboratively on the issue.Keywords: NGOs, innovative policymaking, immigration, legal arena, political strategyIntroductionRecently, Israel has had to deal with massive immigration problems. Since 2007, more than sixty thousand illegal immigrants, from undeveloped countries in the throes of civil war (mainly from the Sudan and Eritrea), have arrived in Israel. These illegal immigrants, have become a burning political issue in south Tel Aviv, where they tend to reside (Immigration and Population Authority, 2013).In Israel there are about seventy thousand legal foreign workers, employed in healthcare services, agriculture, construction, and other jobs; whose work contracts grant them legal, albeit temporary, status. The Ulegal immigrants want to be recognized as refugees, entitling them to work; because as illegal immigrants, they are granted temporary protection, but not the right to work. (Immigration and Population Authority, 2013).Immigration policy in IsraelThe history of immigration to Israel has been radically different from that of other countries. Until fairly recently, the State of Israel had no experience with illegal immigration as seen in Europe or the United States; its focus had been on absorbing Jewish newcomers, who had been encouraged to immigrate.1As a result, no clear policy had been formulated for foreign migrants, who were considered foreign workers. There still exists a lacuna in the immigration laws (Zabar, 2008). The first serious problem stemming from this lack of legal clarity occurred after the 1967 Six-Day War, when thousands of Palestinian workers started to come from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to work in Israel (Semyonov and Lerental, 2005).Analysis of subsequent governmental policy reveals embarrassing failures in policymaking and implementation. Contradictions among ministries, together with lack of coordination, lack of planning, or lack of foresight by the government, impeded the enforcement of regulations that do exist. Although the phenomenon of foreign migration has been growing, the country has not weighed the long-term implications of hiring massive numbers of migrants, nor has it considered the need to protect their rights as workers (Natan, 2009; Nissenkorn, 2002; Semyonov and Lerental, 2005). Israeli governmental policy is ambiguous. On the one hand, Israel needs inexpensive labor for construction, agriculture, and medical care, but on the other hand, the government tries to restrain the numbers of foreign workers in order to maintain Israel's character as a Jewish state. …
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".