The Long Journey to the Promised Land: Policy Initiatives Towards the Third Sector in Israel

In February 2008, the Israeli government had launched a new process designed to strengthen its relations with Third Sector organizations and the “Voluntary world.” The process had followed an historic governmental decision recognizing, for the first time, the Third Sector and its contributions to the Israeli society. The government’s decision, its report and recommendations, can be seen as a new phase in the development of the Israeli Third Sector and has been termed by some scholars as “the second revolution of the Israeli Third Sector” (Gidron 2008). However, the government decision was the product of a long process, which started about eight years before the announcement. The process, which began as an attempt to review the current policy towards the sector and turned out as a set of recommendations for policy change (the Galnoor Report), was launched by an academic research center while the government did not show much interest in the issue. Eight years later, however, the government had decided to adopt most of the committee’s recommendations, which now appear in the governmental report.