The government has managed to advance a key piece of its 2026 state budget in the Knesset after a threatened Charedi rebellion failed to materialise.
Last night, MKs voted to split the Arrangements Law into two bills - one containing the main budgetary measures and the other containing a package of significant reforms.
The budget must pass by the end of March or the Knesset will be dissolved and new elections called.
The Charedi parties had threatened to block the split, thereby forcing the government to pass all the measures as one piece of legislation, in protest at the failure to pass the contentious bill regulating the conscription of yeshiva students.
That bill is still the subject of political and legal wrangling, with the latest hold-up understood to stem from the refusal of Miri Frenkel-Shor, the legal adviser to the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, to sign off on the most recent iteration of the bill.
Frenkel-Shor is reported to have warned that some of the compromises agreed by committee chair Boaz Bismuth (Likud) with the Charedim may not stand up constitutionally and could be struck down by the Supreme Court, which in 2024 overturned the exemption from IDF service yeshiva students had previously enjoyed.
But Shas and United Torah Judaism (UTJ) have threatened to block the budget and force dissolution if the draft bill is not passed first.
Yesterday, Agudat Yisrael, one of the two factions within UTJ, confirmed it would not vote in favour of the division of the Arrangements Law.
But the measure passed by a margin of 60 to 56 regardless, after MKs from the other faction, Degel HaTorah, as well as Shas, joined the coalition in voting for the split.
This means that the coalition only needs to pass the largely uncontentious part of the legislation, mostly consisting of basic budgetary measures like departmental funding, in order to avert an election.
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