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By Failing to Pass a Budget, Israel’s Two Major Parties Risk the Wellbeing of Their Constituents

Aug. 25 2020

Last night, thanks to an agreement between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partner Alternate Prime Minister Benny Gantz , the Knesset voted to give itself another 120 days to approve a budget for the 2020 fiscal year. Had the measure not passed, Israel would have been forced to hold yet another election. Haviv Rettig Gur explains how this situation came about and, why, although another election might be the worst possible outcome, postponing the budget vote is hardly good news:

The budget has loomed over the proceedings of the government not, as might be expected, because the politicians have been hard at work drafting the budget bill, and, lamentably but understandably, battling each other over its provisions and the policies and priorities it reflects.

No, it looms because it is the only mechanism available to Benjamin Netanyahu to call new elections—a fourth race in under two years—without having to cede his office in November 2021 to his rival-turned-partner-turned-rival, Benny Gantz. Netanyahu and Gantz have been circling each other for months, the former seeking to escape the clauses of his coalition agreement, the latter struggling to hold him to it, and the budget has served as the main leverage in that fight.

And that simple fact is an unconscionable tragedy that should call into question the commitment of both men to the public good. Netanyahu is willing to play with the economic condition of millions—and, to rein him in, so is Gantz.

The lack of a state budget law, [meanwhile], has hurt the most vulnerable worst of all.

As Gur goes on to explain, until a budget is passed a wide variety of government programs will go unfunded—for instance, subsidies that help working-class parents send their children to after-school programs, allowing them to work fulltime.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Israeli politics, Knesset

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic