Political Paralysis Has Crippled Israel’s Coronavirus Response

Although the Knesset’s winter session began over a week ago, some of its most important committees are yet to convene, and some of the most urgent items on the legislative agenda have been left to languish. Haviv Rettig Gur explains the consequences:

Perhaps the most basic function of the parliament—to produce the state budget—has been effectively abolished. No budget bill is advancing, even ten months after the expiration of the last budget law. Lacking a budget, the government is limited each month to spending only one-twelfth of the budget of the previous budgeted year, which was 2019. Since the 2019 state budget has little in common with the needs of the pandemic era, the divided coalition must convene every few weeks to pass stopgap additions to the 2019 budget still in force—a few billions more each time to hospitals, to schools, to welfare grants or the military—all in piecemeal increments, without prioritizing the vital over the extraneous or carefully examining the necessity of each budget line, as a regular budget process would do.

These failures are wholly political. The ministers cannot meet to vote on legislation because the Likud and Blue and White [parties], the two anchors of the unity government, cannot agree on its agenda. It’s been months since the cabinet’s legislation committee held regular meetings, and dozens of bills are stuck because of it. Similarly, the budget bill is stuck because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has an overpowering incentive to make sure it does not advance. Under the rules set down by the coalition agreement that established the current government, Netanyahu’s only way to call early elections without handing the premiership to Defense Minister Benny Gantz . . . is if the Knesset dissolves by failing to pass a budget.

The lack of a comprehensive state budget law isn’t a technicality. The government is operating on a series of stopgap spending bills in the middle of a massive economic emergency. That means that no prioritization is taking place, no serious interagency planning is underway, and no MKs, even the most experienced in the labyrinthine ways of the state budget, have a good sense of where the vast funds being approved for coronavirus spending are actually going.

To complicate matters further, the top level of Israel’s financial bureaucracy has gone into revolt with a flurry of resignations.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Coronavirus, Israeli politics, Knesset

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society