Political Paralysis Has Crippled Israel’s Coronavirus Response https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/israel-zionism/2020/10/political-paralysis-has-crippled-israels-coronavirus-response/

October 19, 2020 | Haviv Rettig Gur
About the author: Haviv Rettig Gur is the senior analyst for the Times of Israel.

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 on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-knesset-winter-session-is-off-to-a-running-start-on-a-treadmill/