Koby Simana’s daily agenda is often full of garbage.
As a Koret Fellow and economic adviser to Natan Sharansky, the minister of construction and housing in Israel, the 26-year-old Simana takes a particular interest in the financial issues of waste management.
But talking trash is only part of his job.
Through the fellowship program, funded by a grant from San Francisco’s Koret Foundation, Simana and eight other young adults address and research Israeli economic reform issues for specific Knesset members. They serve as non-political information sources for Israel’s policy makers, but they tend to emphasize a free-market ideology in contrast to the socialist one associated with the Jewish state.
“We’re not bureaucrats,” said Simana, who took part in a Koret Fellows luncheon in San Francisco on Tuesday. “We’re just people who tell the politicians the consequence of their vote, their plans and strategies, on Israel and her economy.”
The fellowship program, which works in conjunction with the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Jerusalem, where fellows receive their training, brings advantages to all involved, he said.
“It’s not only helpful for the fellows but also for the members of Knesset who don’t always know all the details of free economics, or economics at all,” said Simana, who graduated from Tel Aviv University with degrees in education and economics.
“My fellows and I are trying to clear the dust for them of all the buzzwords and slogans broadcast on television and radio.”
The fellowship also provides the opportunity for some of its recruits to spend a month in Washington as congressional aides. Simana and two other fellows, Daniela Green and Moria Katz, were chosen and finished the intensive month on Capitol Hill this week.
The vision of this dark-haired, young man sitting behind a desk in the Knesset clad in a suit and a tie and researching the economic and environmental impacts of refuse is a far stretch from the images of Israel broadcast on the U.S. nightly news.
“The guys I worked with in D.C. assumed that I was spending my days dodging bullets,” he said, “but they soon understood that everything in Israel is much similar to the United States.”
During the month, Simana assisted Rep. Paul Gillmor (R-Ohio) in investigating the interstate shipment of waste and doing research on the issue of drilling for oil and gas in the Great Lakes. He also investigated the levels of waste and gas polluting Lake Erie.
What impressed him most about the month in Washington was “how many aides and consultants a U.S. congressman has in order for them to make the right decisions. In Israel we don’t have that — and we really should.”
He added that the Koret Fellowship program, in its seventh year, and the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies are at the very least a step in the right direction.
“In Israel we have a socialist economy that doesn’t function,” he explained. “So the work of Koret and the institute — of addressing the free market and focusing on the problems of socialism — is very important for Israel and her economy.”
On that note, prior to leaving Israel a month ago, Simana had placed his recommendations for an existing housing program, called Eser Ploos, or Ten Plus, upon Sharansky’s desk.
Designed for Israelis who have problems acquiring a house, despite a legal right to own one, Ten Plus had failed when put into practice; it was Simana’s job to figure out why.
He came up with several possible reasons — foremost a lack of PR.
“Most the people that this program would address were unaware of their rights,” he said. “Normally they’re less educated on economics and less knowledgeable about interest rates and mortgages. The people in our office didn’t really guide them in the process of owning their own home.”
He anticipated that upon his return to Israel he and Sharansky, an ex-refusenik known for politically unifying the Israel’s emigre community, “are going to have a long discussion on it.
“I don’t know if he’ll accept it, but this is what I propose,” he said. “I’m not getting my paycheck, or my scholarship from his office, so I can tell him the truth.”
Simana hopes to go back to school this summer and obtain a master’s degree in business. He has no future plans to enter the public sector himself, but he does see a future for himself in the world of economics, particularly in waste management.
“There’s a lot of money for the country in proper waste management,” said Simana. “People are paying all sorts of taxes and fees to get rid of their garbage, when they should be treating it like a resource.”
Garbage equals money and money equals economic strength, “the only strength that will last at the end of the day,” he emphasized.
“Israel can’t just be militarily strong,” he said. “We have to be economically strong so that the Palestinians, Syrians, Jordanians, Iranians, the Egyptians, the Iraqis — every Arab country in the world — knows that Israel is not just another phenomenon that will fade away in time.
“We’re going to last.”