The Jewish state sets rigorous standards for those who teach, regulate, heal, and build. Why are the people who run ministries allowed to arrive with no academic requirement, no subject-matter mastery, and sometimes no meaningful preparation at all?

This is not a right-versus-left argument. It is a state-capacity argument. It is an argument about seriousness. Israel is a country that demands years of study, credentialing, apprenticeship, and proof of competence from people who want to become professors, senior lecturers, physicians, lawyers, engineers, accountants, and school leaders. Yet when it comes to the people who govern ministries worth billions of shekels and whose decisions shape national security, education, health, infrastructure, and economic policy, the legal threshold collapses almost entirely. To be elected to the Knesset, an Israeli citizen generally must be 21 or older and not under a legal disqualification or certain criminal restrictions. There is no requirement for a bachelor’s degree, no requirement for military or national service, no requirement for professional training, and no requirement for subject-matter expertise in the area a minister may later be asked to run.

Now compare that to academia. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, one of Israel’s flagship institutions, appointment as a lecturer or senior lecturer requires a doctoral degree or equivalent and, as a rule, additional professional development and demonstrated scholarly progress. In other words, to teach at a serious academic level in Israel, you must spend years mastering a field before you are entrusted with students. That is normal. It is rational. It is how serious systems protect standards.

So here is the obvious question, if Israel insists on expertise to teach public policy, why does it not insist on expertise to make public policy?

The current Knesset actually proves both sides of the........

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