A Few Minutes With…Moshe Arbel

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.