Finance Minister Yair Lapid and Trade and Industry Minister Naftali Bennett succeeded in forcing the government into a socioeconomic discourse as a direct result of the tent protests for social justice of 2011. Yet their big test is in whether they will succeed in breaking the state budget pattern in which the defense share reigns supreme. It will be interesting to see how the two will react to the demand to increase the defense budget in light of the increasing number of incidents on the Syrian border, the escalating threats on the southern front, and the never-ending Iranian threat.

Both Bennett and Lapid support cutbacks in defense spending in support of reducing the deficit and preventing cutbacks to the social services budget, or so it would seem based on previous statements they have made. As the well-known Hebrew maxim goes, however, “What you see from there, you don’t see from here.”

They are likely to encounter the same knotty dilemma faced by many good people who preceded them. Thus, for example, rockets were fired from Sinai to Eilat only this week, on April 17, an incident that violated the southern vacation city’s tranquility. This incident will certainly be adopted by the heads of the defense establishment in their regular campaign to avert cuts to their budget. The intimidation campaign launched anew before the annual budget discussions is creative, effective and will stop at nothing – and hence is always successful. 

Now that the state budget’s deficit (about NIS 40 billion [$11 billion]) mandates large-scale fiscal retrenchment, the defense establishment also needs to shave about NIS four billion [$1.1 billion] from its yearly budget (some NIS 60 billion [$16.5 billion], about a sixth of the entire state budget).