Coalition, opposition both claim Knesset victory, but Likud fears repercussions

Read More

For Israel’s ruling coalition, a Knesset vote overnight into Tuesday on subsidizing tuition fees for soldiers was a test of what it can achieve after having lost its parliamentary majority.

Coalition leaders said passage of the law showed that the government can advance its legislative agenda with broad support, even though it has only 60 seats in the 120-member Knesset.

Losing the vote, a senior coalition member said, would have been a major blow. “This wasn’t such an important bill per se, but if we had lost the vote it would have been difficult to continue to say we can manage without a Knesset majority,” he said. “It should have been easy to pass a law such as this one.”

The bill to partially subsidize higher-education tuition fees for recently discharged soldiers passed by a vote of 55 to six. The votes against the bill all came from the Joint List, a predominantly Arab opposition party.

Likud, headed by opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, did not take part in the vote. Party sources told Haaretz that their decision to effectively let the bill pass was frowned upon by ultra-Orthodox opposition parties, who may now be more willing to collaborate with the coalition on some votes.

Coalition leaders expressed satisfaction at the outcome of the vote, noting its success even when one party in the coalition, the United Arab List, gave its lawmakers the freedom to vote as they choose, as is it normally does with legislation involving military and defense policy.

“The UAL could have backed it, but that would have put it into a difficult place with its voters,” a senior official said. “It was clear we didn’t need to put them in a corner like that.”

Why Netanyahu’s Likud plans to vote against a bill that would help soldiers

One man is stitching together Israel’s impossible government – for now

The ‘anyone but Bibi’ war is destroying Israel’s left

Coalition officials see Likud lawmaker’s decision to skip the vote as a blow to opposition parties in general and Netanyahu in particular – not only in opposing the bill so as not to help the coalition, but also in the way they acted in the Knesset.

The Knesset, on Tuesday.Emil Salman

They cited remarks by Likud’s Miri Regev, who said at a faction meeting before the vote: “We have decided to be a militant opposition, so we can’t go soft when it comes to rape, battered women or soldiers. Everyone understands this is the rationale.”

In addition, rifts within Netanyahu’s party and between Likud and other opposition parties over how to vote were exposed before the vote.

Several Likud lawmakers made clear to Netanyahu that they planned to support a compromise proposed by Defense Minister Benny Gantz, leaving Netanyahu with little choice but to back it, too.

Under Gantz’s compromise plan, the scholarships were increased from 66 percent of a recipient’s tuition costs, as the original text stated, to 75 percent.

The main opponent to the compromise was Bezalel Smotrich – chairman of the Religious Zionism party and a staunch opponent of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a former party colleague – who was afraid the vote would be seen as a victory for the coalition.

Opposition leaders rushed to declare their own victory after the vote. “We fought to increase scholarships for IDF combat troops,” Likud said in a statement, emphasizing their role in reaching the compromise after pressure in recent days from ultra-Orthodox parties to oppose the bill altogether.

Ultra-Orthodox lawmakers argued that they had voted against legislation they would normally have backed only because it was sponsored by the coalition, and therefore Likud should have done the same.

This may have opened the door for ultra-Orthodox parties to consider collaboration with the coalition on specific bills that are important to them, a senior Likud official said. However, there is no planned vote soon on any such bills.