Comparative Homeland Security

Global Lessons

Nadav Morag

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119412441
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Terrorismo

Introduces the reader to a variety of overseas Homeland Security strategies, policies, and practices in order to present approaches to addressing homeland security challenges and inform students and practitioners

This book educates those studying or involved in American Homeland Security on the policies and procedures set by other countries so that they can learn from foreign experiences and determine which overseas approaches may be applicable to improving US Homeland Security policy. The book is broken down into topical categories reflecting some of the major areas within the field of Homeland Security. Each chapter comprises a discussion of strategic policies followed by a set of countries in the context of the subset of Homeland Security addressed in that particular chapter. The book also delves into cybersecurity policy issues, an area that has been growing exponentially but was not touched on in the first edition.

The new edition of Comparative Homeland Security: Global Lessons updates foreign laws, strategies, and policies while expanding the depth and range of the discussion to include additional overseas policies. Based on eleven countries procedures and nine homeland security dimensions, it covers: Counterterrorism Strategies, Laws and Institutions; Law Enforcement Institutions and Strategies; Immigration and Counter-Radicalization; The Role of the Military in Security and Support for Civil Authorities; Border Security, Naturalization, and Asylum Policies; Security Facilities, Cyber Networks, and Transportation; Emergency Preparedness, Emergency Response and Management and Crisis Communications; and Public Health Strategies and Institutions.

• New edition updates foreign strategies and policies and extends the scope of discussion of these topics
• Expanded approach for a wider range of students and practitioners exploring the homeland security policies of other countries
• Covers strategies and tactics to combat terrorism from a number of the world's democracies including: Great Britain, Israel, France, Germany, Canada, and Australia
• Chapters are organized topically rather than by country, thus allowing students and practitioners to easily compare policies and integrate the concepts presented into practice

Comparative Homeland Security: Global Lessons, Second Edition is an excellent book for all scholars, students, and practitioners interested or involved in homeland security, emergency management, law enforcement, criminal justice, counter-terrorism, public health, transportation security, border security, and cybersecurity.

CHAPTER 1
COUNTRY OVERVIEW

Each of the countries surveyed in this book should first be understood in the context of their governance systems. This means looking at the constitutional underpinnings; the relationship between the executive, legislature, and judiciary; and the nature of territorial governance (federalism, centralism, and other models). There are a number of excellent texts focusing on particular countries’ governance systems that can provide the reader with a comprehensive understanding of these countries. The goal here is not to repeat those efforts but rather to focus on governance within the homeland security sphere. At the same time, it is important to establish some very basic knowledge of the governance systems of the countries to be surveyed in order to provide the legal, political, and institutional context within which to look at homeland security policies. The following is therefore a highly abridged overview of the countries to be focused on in the survey. These are Israel, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Japan.

STATE OF ISRAEL (MEDINAT YISRAEL)

MAP 1.1 Map of Israel.

Israel is a small country with a total area of 22 072 km² (approximately the size of the American states of New Jersey or Massachusetts). It has a population of 8.68 million inhabitants (75% Jews and 21% Arabs, the remainder of the population consisting of small minority communities – non‐Arab Christians, Bahai’i, Circassians, etc.). It also controls, but has not annexed, a large section of the West Bank and has annexed the northern, southern, and eastern sections of the city of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights (all of these territories were conquered during the Six‐Day War of 1967). Most of the population lives in the temperate central and northern 40% of the country (which enjoys a Mediterranean climate) with most of the desert regions of the south sparsely populated. The topography varies from rocky and partially wooded hills in the north and east to sandy coastal plains in the west and to rugged desert hills in the south. Israel is a highly urbanized country with 92% of the population living in towns or cities, and 82% of the workforce employed in service industries, 16% in heavy industries, and only 2% employed in the agricultural sector. The leading sector in the economy is the hi‐tech sector, and Israel is one of the world’s leading producers of computer software, communications technology, avionics, and medical electronics.

The State of Israel was declared on 14 May 1948 upon expiration of the British Mandate for Palestine. The new state, however, did not appear in a vacuum and was established upon a foundation of three decades of nation‐building and institution‐building by a largely autonomous Jewish community (known in Hebrew as the Yishuv) operating under the administration of the British Mandate for Palestine. This incubatory period made it possible for the new state to come into existence with surprisingly robust and tested democratic institutions and traditions. In fact, it is quite remarkable that Israel was able to maintain an unbroken record of democratic rule throughout the years given the significant security challenges that if faced, including no less than seven full‐scale wars as well as several additional significant military operations and long periods of dealing with intensive terrorist campaigns.

Figure 1.1 Israeli parliament building.

Credit: Roman Yanushevsky/Shutterstock.com.

Israel is a parliamentary democracy and thus follows the principle of “responsible government” (in that the executive branch, known as the “government,” is responsible to parliament and can be replaced by it). This means that the government must enjoy the support of the majority of the parliament (or, at the very least, avoid being voted out by a majority of the parliament), and the parliament has the power to unseat the prime minister and the rest of the cabinet if they lose majority support in the parliament (usually via a parliamentary procedure known as a “vote of no confidence”). The upshot is that in such systems, the parliament is not only responsible for passing legislation but is also responsible for creating governments (cabinets). All of the countries surveyed in this book are parliamentary democracies of one sort or another, the only exception being France, which has a hybrid, or semipresidential, system. Indeed, while it may seem strange to American readers, the presidential system employed by the United States (in which the executive branch is independent of the legislative branch) is rare among democracies and largely confined to the Western Hemisphere. In a parliamentary system like Israel’s, the government, that is, the ministerial level of the executive branch (the cabinet), is created from the legislature (the parliament) so that the prime minister and the other cabinet ministers are also members of parliament (MPs) – in some systems, all cabinet members must be MPs and in others only some are MPs, while in yet others cabinet ministers cannot be MPs. In the Israeli case, at a minimum, the prime minister and half of the cabinet must be MPs, but, in practice, the vast majority of (and often, all) government ministers are also MPs. In a parliamentary system, the prime minister is not elected directly but rather is elected to parliament (either by representing a voting district or, as in the Israeli case, by running at the head of a party list of candidates), and those cabinet ministers who are also MPs are also similarly elected to parliament (with the non‐MP ministers appointed by the prime minister). Consequently, in the Israeli system, as in other parliamentary democracies, there is no constitutional separation between the executive and legislative branches. Most parliamentary systems comprise a bicameral parliament (two legislative houses), but Israel has a unicameral parliament – called the Knesset. The Knesset consists of 120 MPs (known as MKs [members of Knesset]), and the prime minister and the vast majority of his/her cabinet members are among those 120 members (with each enjoying one vote).

As noted above, all Israeli MKs are voted in by party list as there are no voting districts in Israel (or rather, the country is one voting district). This system of election is known as “proportional representation” and is quite rare among parliamentary systems – most of which employ some version of the “winner‐take‐all” system in which the candidate with the most votes (though not necessarily a majority of votes) in any given voting district is elected to represent that district (the British, using a horse racing metaphor, refer to this as “first‐past‐the‐post”). In many ways, the proportional representation system is very democratic in that it essentially means that the leaders of smaller parties that represent only a fraction of the voters are able to achieve parliamentary office and thus, at least theoretically, represent the views and preferences of those voters. Thus, whole swaths of minority opinion can enjoy representation, whereas in a “first‐past‐the‐post” voting system like that of the United States, voters who supported candidates and parties that only garner a fraction of the votes are essentially ignored. This is one of the reasons that such systems tend to have fewer candidates from non‐mainstream parties achieving a place in the legislature. If the United States, which has a “winner‐take‐all” system, were to hypothetically institute a proportional representation voting system, one can be certain that Congress would include a wide variety of parties and the effective two‐party monopoly of power that exists today would be challenged and probably broken down over time. One of the downsides, however, of this voting system is that it often affords small parties and their leaders (that represent a political minority of one kind or another) the power to impose themselves on the majority (something that is not terribly democratic). As a result of the proportional representation voting system, and in view of the deep divisions in the Israeli body politic, elections for the Knesset produce a very large number of parties. At the time of this writing, the current Knesset membership (the 20th Knesset, voted in on 17 March 2015) belongs to no less than 10 separate political parties with the largest party, the Likud holding 30 seats and the second largest party, the Zionist Camp, which heads the opposition, holding 24 seats. Since a government (that is, the prime minister and the other members of the cabinet, who are collectively tasked with running the executive branch) can only be voted in with a majority in the Knesset, this means that the Likud is 29 seats shy of enjoying a slight majority in the Knesset (61 seats, of course, being needed for a minimal majority).

This current distribution of seats in the Israeli parliament is not unique. No Israeli political party has ever come clo...