It's a little difficult to follow the dispute about whether the state budget will be for one year or two, but one thing is clear – nothing about the dispute has anything to do with the matter at hand. The discussions about the budget are a big headache. Ministers clash with the Finance Ministry's Budgets Department, asking for more and receiving less. MKs force themselves to stay awake during debates and votes. Anyone who wants to speak is allowed to, and some of the devout spend hours talking to an empty plenum.
But the budget is also the most democratic event of any Knesset session. By presenting it, the government exposes its priorities, the subjects it believes are worthy of attention and encouragement, as well as the ones it's willing to pass on. The decision about the budget includes not only what the government wants, but also what it does not want or what it sees as less important. This is the moment when the Knesset can make changes – even small ones – to government proposals. This is why in a democratic state, the budget covers a single year. This is when the most important confrontation between the government and the opposition takes place, and that is why a failure to pass a budget leads to a new election.
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In 2009, when Prime Minister Netanyahu was re-elected, scarred from his first term in office, raised the idea of a two-year budget. He had one simple motive: to reduce conflict between the coalition and the opposition, while allowing the government freedom of action for a longer time, without worrying that it might be toppled.
The main argument from critics of the two-year budget was that a change of that type, much like limiting the options for a vote of no confidence, was an attack on democracy and meaningful public debate about the government's priorities. Most economists argued that there was a reason why yearly budgets were the norm – longer-term budgets can be too rigid, and make it difficult to meets the needs of a changing reality. Anyone who claimed that there was no precedent for such a system, whose only purpose was the reduce the chance that the government might be brought down, was met with the answer that there was indeed a country that passed a two-year budget: Bahrain.
To make it possible to pass a two-year budget, it was necessary to change the basic law that governed the state budget. In 2009, it was amended as a temporary government decision, which has since been extended every two years. A few times, the High Court was asked to examine the legality of this arrangement and noted that it was not acceptable to change a basic law through a temporary directive, and if the law were not amended through legally acceptable means, the court could reject future extensions.
In the coalition agreement, Netanyahu raised again raised the idea of a two-year budget, with the same idea of avoiding a yearly clash in the Knesset. Whether Benny Gantz has held an in-depth discussion of the issue, or whether he and his staff lent their hands to it because they couldn't come to grips with the problematic nature of the question when it came to the coalition deal, this isn't what the dispute is about.
When Netanyahu realized that a failure to pass a budget would allow his government to fall, without him needing to hand Gantz the reins, he took back his support of the two-year budget and used those same economists – in the Treasury and elsewhere – who criticized the idea in the first place. Without blinking, he said, said that experts opposed a two-year budget and that the part of the coalition agreement – signed only weeks earlier – about the budget should be deleted and the coalition should adopt the good old one-year budget approach. Gantz, who realized what was behind Bibi's about-face, clung to experts who prefer the two-year budget, but only because someone explained to him why Netanyahu had changed his mind.
And the economy? And what about democratic rule of law in Israel? They'll talk about that some other time.
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