The Ministry of Home Front Defense was created in January 2011 during the days of the second Netanyahu government for clear political reasons and one single purpose: to preserve the diplomatic deadlock. At the time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defense Minister Ehud Barak were facing serious pressure from two senior members of the Labor Party, who sat with them in the Cabinet: Binyamin (Fouad) Ben Eliezer and Isaac (Buji) Herzog. They demanded that the diplomatic process with the Palestinians be revived and threatened to quit the government if the deadlock continued.

Barak and Netanyahu, then the Bobbsey Twins of Israeli politics, were fed up with all those threats. Barak wanted to continue serving as defense minister, Netanyahu wanted him by his side when dealing with the Iranian issue and both were concerned about the integrity of the coalition. That was the background for the establishment of the Atzmaut faction in the Knesset, which split off from the Labor Party practically overnight. In addition to its Chairman Barak, Atzmaut also included Minister Shalom Simhon, Deputy Ministers Matan Vilnai and Orit Noked and Knesset member Einat Wilf. As compensation for their decision to break with their original party, Noked and Vilnai were offered a promotion to full ministerial positions. Noked became the minister of agriculture and Vilnai, a retired general who was then serving as deputy minister of defense, was put in charge of the new Ministry of Home Front Defense, created for the occasion.

Even now, four years later, it is impossible to find any ideological motive for the move, which resulted in the five members of Atzmaut being expunged from the political system. In contrast, the Ministry of Home Front Defense may have been born in sin, but it remains with us until today, having gone through two other ministers since its inception. And it is still unclear what contribution it brings into our lives. If ever we needed a mirror placed right in front of us to prove yet again how infected our national interest is with political considerations, we got it this past weekend in the shape of the storm — which kept hundreds of thousands of people home for days, with tens of thousands cut off for days from electricity and water. It was sheer chaos. Four days after the storm began, life in dozens of localities has yet to get back on track. 

That should have been the seminal moment for the Ministry of Home Front Defense, which was created, or so we were told, to provide an appropriate response to the challenges posed by war and natural disasters. There would be one group, headed by a minister, to synchronize all of the country’s emergency groups and agencies so that they could work in harmony, like a well-tuned orchestra. But the events of this past weekend only proved how useless it actually was. The Ministry of Home Front Defense simply ceased to exist during the days of the storm. This is not the time to point a finger at the ministry's head, Gilad Erdan, who is one of the most diligent and promising Likud ministers in the government. He also suffered from the anomaly of having a government ministry that has no real authority or ability to implement its decisions, since these all lie with the Ministry of Defense.