Amid public protests in Jerusalem, the intense debate over judicial reform, and terror and riots in the West Bank, one might be forgiven for overlooking another significant event in Israeli politics: the cabinet’s budget deliberations on February 23 and 24, which ended in an unusual stalemate. Haviv Rettig Gur describes how this 21-hour marathon cabinet session, which happens every few years, normally proceeds, and what made this year different:

It’s called “Government Night,” and it always begins the same way—at 11 a.m. on a Thursday with a presentation by Treasury economists on the big-picture state of the Israeli economy. After the presentation, the Treasury’s budget teams choose different corners in the wood-paneled cabinet conference room and huddle there with their respective minister and senior aides: the healthcare team with the health minister, the education team with the education minister, and so on. Hours of ferocious bargaining ensue in each huddle, and over the next few hours the teams slowly piece together a state budget for the next two years.

Meanwhile, in an office down the hall sits the treasury’s “Macro Team,” a kind of internal budgets department for the budgets department. As each issue team negotiates with its respective minister, any concessions are then taken for approval to the Macro Team, whose job is to ensure overall spending doesn’t balloon out of control. Any funds added to one ministry must be pulled from another. It’s a complex and tense give-and-take that lasts through the night.

It is almost impossible to exaggerate the importance of Government Night in the proper management of Israel’s fiscal affairs; it is where the rubber hits the road, where ministers’ campaign promises and legacy aspirations run head-first into fiscal realities, where a government’s priorities are clarified in hard shekel terms. And at last week’s Government Night, the Netanyahu government couldn’t get the job done.

At around 10:30 a.m., long after the budget bill was supposed to have been approved in the traditional, festive cabinet vote, a worried Netanyahu concluded that the spectacle was causing real harm to the Israeli economy. Ordinary Israelis don’t know about Government Night, but investors follow it closely for signs of any slips in the government’s commitment to fiscal restraint.

In Gur’s view, the collapse of ordinary budget negotiations, together with the disappearance of key ministers during Sunday’s outbreak of violence, speaks to a cabinet that does not have a firm hand on the rudder of the ship of state.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.