A bill calling for the annexation of Judea and Samaria that would have humiliated Prime Minister Naftali Bennett will not come to a vote in the Knesset plenum this week, due to Knesset Speaker Mickey Levy’s insistence on staying out of controversy during the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha.
The bill, sponsored by Likud MK Miki Zohar, will come to a vote in the Ministerial Committee on Legislation on Monday. The coalition will vote against the bill, despite the strong support for annexation on the part of Bennett (Yamina) and the committee’s chairman, Justice Minister Gideon Sa'ar (New Hope).
Zohar wanted to bring the bill to a vote in the Knesset on Wednesday, but Levy vetoed any bill that does not have the backing of both the coalition and the opposition. Another bill that has been curtailed by the Muslim holiday, sponsored by Likud MK Ofir Katz, would make it easier to disqualify Arab Knesset candidates by widening the criteria of “supporting terror.”
On the coalition side, New Hope chairwoman Sharren Haskel will bring to the ministerial committee her bill to enable civil marriage and divorces in embassies and consulates. But the controversial bill will not be brought to the Knesset yet.
Levy made the decision at the request of Ra’am (United Arab List) head Mansour Abbas, who is deputy Knesset Speaker and wants a week without political discord to enable his faction’s MKs to observe their holiday. Abbas also decided to end a short-lived crisis over Jews visiting the Temple Mount on Tisha Be’av for the same reason.
After initially sharply condemning renegade Yamina MK Amichai Chikli for singing Hatikva on the holy site and making his wrath clear to Bennett’s associates, Abbas decided not to further pursue his protest.
“Ra’am has no interest in destabilizing the coalition,” a source close to Bennett said. “The crisis is behind us.”
Only next week will controversial legislation return, including the annexation bill, and then Haskel’s cannabis decriminalization bill, which she postponed at Abbas’s request. Haskel made clear to Abbas that if he prevented the bill’s passage, she could make it harder to pass his faction’s bill recognizing three Bedouin villages in the Negev.
Following the Knesset’s summer recess, the focus in the coalition will shift to passing the state budget. The heads of the opposition Joint List will meet with Bennett and Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid this week to present their demands for supporting the budget.
In an interview with Meet the Press on N12 on Saturday night, Joint List leader Ayman Odeh said that his party will not support a budget “that harms Israel’s weakest citizens,” that he said Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman was leading.
When asked whether or not he would support the budget, he responded that he would not, but interviewer Rina Matzliah cut off the rest of his response. If Odeh announces unequivocally that his party will vote against the budget, the coalition will have a hard time pushing it through.
In an interview with Matzliah on Saturday evening, Abbas called on the Joint List to “stop opposing our role in the government while cutting deals with the Likud under the table.”