One of the central demands of the protest movement of the summer of 2011 was to end the policy of privatization. This report, the second in the series, documents what the Israeli government actually did in 2011: a total of 34 privatizations and four nationalizations. Despite the differences among the various cases and the agencies responsible for each, the aggregate picture does indeed indicate the dominant policy. The case studies are divided into ten categories: government companies; education; healthcare; labor and social services; the judicial system; land, the environment, housing, and planning and construction reform; defense; policy planning and policy review; privatization of oversight and deregulation; and nationalization.

The report is published annually as part of a comprehensive project, “State Responsibility, the Boundaries of Privatization, and Regulatory Issues,” which has been running at the Hazan Center for Social Justice and Democracy of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute since 2007. The project investigates government powers and endeavors to define which of them ought to be privatized and which not, and, on the basis of this, to compose a policy document for presentation to the Israeli public and decision-makers.

The project staff comprises: Prof. Itzhak Galnoor, academic director; Dr. Amir Paz-Fuchs, co-academic director and researcher; Elad Leshem, researcher and author of the annual report; Anat Mufkadi, policy promoter; Adv. Yifat Solel, legislation coordinator; Gila Orkin, fundraiser; and Nomika Zion, project head. Some 25 researchers are involved in the project, which is supervised by a steering committee of experts in law, political science, economics, public policy, and other fields.