Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu succeeded in passing a budget through the parliament, or Knesset, on Wednesday after an all-night voting marathon that preserved his government for the foreseeable future.
There had been talk of Netanyahu’s government potentially collapsing if his coalition partners could not agree on spending priorities, the most contentious of which was a proposal to redistribute commercial property taxes from wealthier cities to poorer municipalities with more religious populations and less business investment.
But as the Times of Israel noted, Netanyahu made several last-minute deals to ensure the budget’s passage:
With a May 29 deadline to pass a budget or call new elections looming, Netanyahu scrambled in recent weeks to meet his coalition partners’ demands, clinching some deals Monday to pave the way for the vote, which began late Tuesday.
The passage buys Netanyahu and his government another 18 months until the Knesset must approve another budget and puts to rest the coalition’s largest internal point of contention.
“This is a good budget. It will serve the citizens of Israel,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said from the Knesset podium after the vote, to cheers and applause from coalition lawmakers standing together in a show of unity to celebrate the milestone.
The budget also preserves a status quo that is resented by many secular Israelis in which religious students are able to obtain exemptions from military service. Past efforts to resolve the issue have failed, thanks partly to Israel’s Supreme Court, which struck down a compromise in 2017. The Court’s intervention in legislative affairs has fueled enthusiasm for judicial reforms, which Netanyahu is attempting to pursue against strong opposition.
The opposition parties decried the budget, which they attempted to oppose in the hope of ousting Netanyahu from office six months after he and his right-wing partners swept the country’s elections in November 2022.
Now that Netanyahu’s government has survived its most serious internal test, one it will not have to face again until the next budget battle in 18 months, the prime minister said he intends to turn his attention back to the controversial judicial reforms that are currently being negotiated with the opposition under the auspices of Israel’s ceremonial president. That, too, met with shrill condemnation by the country’s opposition leaders.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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