The inscription was on the wall. For more than a month, the Israeli government has had time to discuss and decide what the first phase of the closure eases will include, but no such discussion took place. Only at two o'clock last Saturday night, just hours before the previous regulations expired, the telephone cabinet meeting convened to approve the new guidelines, which were published to the public the next morning - that is, with no interval to plan the changes in our daily routine. Prime Minister Netanyahu is laudable for two decisions he has made, thanks to which Israel is in relatively good shape in the Corona story: early stops of incoming flights, and the aggravating social distance - closure. But now that we have come to the need to start the closure, the deficiencies in crisis management and the decision-making process are tightened, deficiencies that jeopardize the most important component without which such a crisis cannot be managed: public confidence in government and its cooperation with the difficult decrees that the situation requires. 

The Saturday night government meeting was an illustration of this problem: The guidelines had already been formulated by Netanyahu and the health and finance ministers earlier, and so the ministers found themselves fighting to change clauses in retrospect, with Netanyahu explaining that there is no time for discussion in the morning that the previous guidelines expire. The meeting was a direct continuation of the previous meeting convened Thursday to discuss the closure easing. There were all the ministers and senior officials. At the end of the seven-hour discussion, one of the participants told me: "It was like a neighborhood." Another senior participant told me: "So far, I did not understand what was decided there." 

This is just a symptom of something broader: So far, no plan has been presented to the Israeli public for exiting the closure that sets out a gradual process for the release of the economy and the education system, nor the conditions for moving to further steps of release. In this aspect, Israel is not in a good place. In Germany, Chancellor Merkel reported last week detailing what the first phase of returning to routine would look like and what it would include in the second phase, during which some students will return to school. In the US, President Trump also introduced a three-step plan last week to return to normal.

Presenting a plan to the public is not just a formalist matter. In a situation where people are shaking - financially, personally, family - the ability to maintain public compliance with the directives and prevent a "straight man's eyes" will depend, above all, on citizens' understanding of what further action plan is, what logic is guided by it, and what criteria will be used to facilitate them. More. 

At the PM's hearings on Thursday evening, at least three different options came up for such criteria: the number of new infections, the status of the respirators, or even dividing the population by the degree of risk of each citizen being infected with the virus. But the discussion ended without a decision, at night's telephone cabinet meeting at night did not discuss it, and as of this writing, the public in Israel does not know what conditions to relieve closure or tighten again - in the event of a corona re-eruption. Citizens may lose confidence in decision makers, lose the willingness to obey the burdensome restrictions, and begin to do justice to themselves, and without such collective discipline, we will have no ability to control the epidemic and defeat the Corona.

Moab Vardi is the head of the public broadcasting corporation's foreign affairs and submits the "World Today" program here 11