This report, the third of its kind, succinctly surveys thirty-three instances of privatization and seven instances of nationalization carried out by the State of Israel in 2012. About half of the entries are updates of processes that began in previous years, and half of them are new. The report summarizes the year following the social protest, a fact that puts it in a somewhat different public context. The report of the Trachtenberg Committee recommended reconsidering the privatizations, and the recommendations of the committees of experts that advised the protesters included the demand that the privatizations be frozen and that a new policy be established; they even demanded that privatizations be reversed. Despite these recommendations, the report shows that the thirty-second government did not change the privatization policy.

The report is published annually as part of a comprehensive project, “State Responsibility, the Boundaries of Privatization, and Regulatory Issues,” which has been running at the Chazan Center for Social Justice and Democracy of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute since 2007. The project investigates government powers and endeavors to define which of them ought to be privatized and which not, and, on the basis of this, to compose a policy document for presentation to the Israeli public and decision-makers.

The project staff comprises: Prof. Itzhak Galnoor, academic director; Dr. Amir Paz-Fuchs, co-academic director and researcher; Dr. Sarit Bensimhon-Peleg, researcher and author of the annual report; Dr. Varda Shiffer, researcher and ; Noga Eitan, policy promoter; Adv. Yifat Solel, legislation coordinator; Gila Orkin, fundraiser; and Nomika Zion, project head. Some 30 researchers are involved in the project, which is supervised by a steering committee of experts in law, political science, economics, public policy, and other fields. The Friedrich Ebert Foundation participated in the preparation of the report.