New Interior Minister Moshe Arbel on Israel’s Passport Chaos

Photo: Flash 90

He’s a chareidi who can speak the polished Hebrew favored by educated secular elites, and a shul rabbi with multiple law degrees. He criticizes the Israeli justice system — but not too harshly, as a product of Ono Academic College and Reichman University’s law program, taught by Aharon Barak, the father of the judicial revolution that put Israeli judges in charge of the government.

Please welcome Shas MK Moshe Arbel, the new minister of health and the interior. At 39, he’s one of the government’s younger ministers, and was only appointed to the two senior posts last month. Moshe Arbel is considered a rising star in Israeli politics and reminds many of the Aryeh Deri of the ’80s.

Arbel has accompanied Deri for years as the interior minister’s chief of staff, and was drafted to replace him in the cabinet when the High Court disqualified Deri from serving as a minister. Deri himself is still waiting for a legal arrangement that will enable his return to the government table.

But for now, Arbel is giving his job everything he’s got. He devoted the first two weeks of his term to tackling the Interior Ministry’s passport crisis, which made it harder for Israeli citizens to renew their passports than to get an American green card. The phenomenon came to a head when Russian hackers took over the government system for scheduling appointments, snapping up time slots wholesale and selling them on the dark web to the highest bidder.

We met Arbel this week during a surprise visit to Interior Ministry offices and hospitals. He’s keeping one ear attuned to Aryeh Deri, who’s still giving orders from afar to Shas MKs. But he’s giving all the rest of his attention to Interior Ministry staff, who have been forced to spend extended hours in the office to deal with a backlog of more than a million Israelis waiting for new passports. Unfortunately for the 30,000 kollel families who live in Israel without citizenship, the passport marathon has meant that all other normal Interior Ministry services have ceased totally for weeks.

Minister Arbel sat with Mishpacha to discuss this crisis, as well as how the judicial reform and the Knesset debate over the budget have impacted chareidim.

With your permission, let’s start with the story that’s been occupying you night and day. How did we reach a state of affairs where an Israeli citizen can’t get a passport?

You have to go back ten years to understand the magnitude of the crisis. About a decade ago, Israel began switching to biometric passports to prevent fraud. Naturally, the process of issuing a biometric passport takes more time, and this led to congestion. Add to this the Covid pandemic, which led many to delay renewing their passports because there were no flights… And on top of all that, Israel’s population growth is the fastest in the West.

Largely thanks to the chareidi community…

Thanks in part to the chareidi and Arab communities, but the average in the rest of the population is also higher than in the West, and of course we see this as a blessing.

But all these factors led to a massive traffic jam on the waiting list for passports. All kinds of solutions have been tried over the years. The previous government’s interior minister, Ayelet Shaked, came up with a temporary solution of issuing non-biometric passports good for two years, but now that those temporary passports have expired, it’s intensifying the congestion.

And then we have the unbelievable story of the Russian hackers who took over the appointment scheduling system of a country that calls itself the “start-up nation.”

That’s true. There were hackers, some of them Russian, who took over the scheduling system and sold appointments to the highest bidder. What led to this is a distortion in the law. The current law allows any new oleh to receive Israeli citizenship, even if he doesn’t reside in Israel. But many immigrants from the former Soviet Union have abused this. They arrive on a stopover in Israel, obtain a passport, and continue to their actual destination country. And for those taking advantage of this loophole, it’s worth it to purchase an appointment from the hackers, to save the costs of a few days’ stay in Israel. They land for a few hours, get the appointment they bought from the hackers, obtain a passport, and move on.