"The parliamentary system has fulfilled its purpose, and Israel must now adopt a presidential system that will be better at decision-making," Prof. Yehezkel Dror, a member of the Winograd Committee, declared on Tuesday evening in his first public appearance since the Winograd Report's release last week.
"We need, as a friend of mine called it, to move on to the 'Second Republic,'" said Dror, a world-renowned Israel Prize laureate in public policy who has been advising Israeli governments since the 1960s.
Speaking at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Dror outlined what he believed were the state's structural problems, and some proposed solutions.
One of the primary failures of Israeli strategic planning centered on the issue of kidnappings. "The Israeli response of enormous payments [for the kidnapped] created the problem of kidnappings as a strategic weapon against us," he said. "We have educated the other side to focus on kidnapping, and those who will die in captivity in the future will be paying this price." |