PFEFFER’S ISRAEL

IF ALL goes to plan, in the early hours of Thursday morning, the members of the Knesset, after a long filibustered debate, will have pressed the voting buttons in front of them and Israel’s state budget for 2021-22 will have passed its final readings. For the first time in nearly two years, the Israeli government will no longer be working on fiscal auto-pilot, and a long period of political and financial instability will finally be over. That is if all goes to plan and the leaders of the eight parties in government can ensure that all their members are present and voting according to the coalition agreement.

Near the end of this week, they seemed reasonably confident all the clauses of the 885 billion shekel (£200 billion) budget for the year which is nearly over and for the next 12 months were agreed. Not every spending item was easily palatable to the coalition partners. The left had to swallow funding for West Bank settlements and the right agreed to money to illegally constructed Bedouin townships in the Negev which they believe are eroding the state’s authority. But that is the nature of this polyglot coalition.

Naftali Bennett’s government will have reached the closest thing it has to a safe haven; 143 days after it was inaugurated, it has defied the expectations of many by making it this far. In the last four and a half months, despite a majority of only two MKs, it has lost only three votes, passed most legislation it planned and with a budget passed before the deadline on 14 November, which would have triggered a new election, will be reasonably secure. The next budget deadline is June 2023. Even opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who promised on the day he was forced out of office “we will be back soon,” admitted last week it could take “two weeks or three and a half years,” until Likud make it back.

GOING ROUND IN CIRCLES

When coalition members are asked who may prove to be the source of future discord, the name most often mentioned is that of Defence Minister Benny Gantz.

If, ten months ago, Benjamin Netanyahu had stood by the coalition agreement he signed with Mr Gantz and allowed the budget to pass then, it may still have been in existence and in just a couple of weeks the “rotation” would have taken place. All that is by now distant history. Many would have doubted Mr Netanyahu was going to honour the agreement but that doesn’t change the fact that Mr Gantz still has 17 November in his diary as the day he was to become Israel’s prime minister.

In interviews Mr Gantz says he hasn’t given up on his ambition to be prime minister, but it can’t happen in this government. Instead it will be Yair Lapid, who was once his junior partner in the leadership of Blue and White, who will replace Mr Bennett in August 2023.

It clearly rankles and Gantz barely hides the fact that he has little respect for either of the younger men. When he talks of his decisions as defence minister, he refers to “my policy” and what is perceived as his independent actions anger both sides of the coalition, right and left.

That was the case back in August when he travelled to Ramallah

This coalition will last two weeks or three years, said Netanyahu