Marathon Knesset session on government bills begins

Likud, Blue and White deny target dates for coalition.

By GIL HOFFMAN
Blue and White leader Benny Gantz and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (photo credit: REUTERS)
Blue and White leader Benny Gantz and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
(photo credit: REUTERS)
The Knesset plenum began what is expected to be a marathon session of deliberations on the bills necessary to form a government on Tuesday morning ahead of Thursday night's deadline to pass the bills.
Opposition parties submitted 1,000 amendments to the bills in an attempt to filibuster and make Likud and Blue and White miss the deadline. They submitted 9,000 in a Knesset committee this week, but they agreed to limit it to 1,000 in the plenum.
Presumptive opposition leader Yair Lapid started the marathon session with a speech condemning his former political partner, Blue and White leader Benny Gantz, for legislating the bills enabling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to form the government and remain in office until November 2021.
"When you go to elections based on a set of principles you either win or lose but you don’t change your principles if you lose, and you definitely don’t change them if you win," Lapid told the MKs. "This isn’t an emergency government. Last night, the prime minister said in a press conference that we’re on the way out of the emergency situation. He killed the excuse for creating this government."
During his speech, Lapid addressed the loss of public trust in the political system.
"You don’t fight corruption from within," he said. "If you’re inside, you’re part of the problem. You can’t put integrity on hold for 18 months and then come back to it. It can’t go on like this. That will be the first task of the opposition: To restore public faith in this house and prove to the public that there are politicians who take their values and their promises seriously."
Lapid attacked the formation of the government and said that instead of every shekel going to save the economy, it is being used to buying MKs with unnecessary jobs.
"People have lost their jobs, their livelihood, in the past weeks and are drowning in debt," he said. "They are looking at you and can’t believe their eyes. It’s at their expense, using their money. What you’re forming isn’t a government, it’s an entire job agency - a corrupt carnival of jobs under the auspices of the coronavirus."
Once the bills are passed on Thursday, Netanyahu will submit the signatures of the necessary 61 MKs calling for him to form the government to President Reuven Rivlin, who will give him a two-week mandate that will end on May 25. The Knesset speaker can then postpone the swearing-in ceremony for one week, making June 1 the last day a government can be formed.
Army Radio reported on Tuesday morning that Netanyahu and Gantz had agreed to complete the government's formation by next Thursday, May 14. Spokesmen for both men denied the report.
"We are doing everything we can in order to a swear in a government as early as possible," a Likud spokesman said.