Why it pays to be a settler in Israel
The 2015-2016 state budget reflects well the priorities of the Netanyahu government, with generous funding and allocations to the settlers and religious parties, while neglecting the periphery, the Arabs and Israel's secular heritage.
Israel’s botanical gardens will face millions of shekels in budgetary cuts. While this may seem like a fairly insignificant detail of the 2015-2016 state budget, which was approved by the Knesset on Nov. 19, it offers a glimpse into this government’s civic priorities.
Earlier this week, the staff of the botanical gardens and students from various faculties of agriculture across the country tried to prevent the decree, but the cut — from 4.5 million shekels (about $1.6 million) to just 100,000 shekels (some $26,000) per year — could deal a death blow to the gardens, which are heritage sites in every sense of the term. Yet despite their symbolic importance, they were pushed to the margins of the public debate. And so, while HaBayit HaYehudi, the party of Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel, responsible for the botanical gardens, celebrated one achievement after the other in the Knesset’s Finance Committee concerning funds allocated to the settlements, there was no one to actually fight on behalf of the country’s botanical gardens, a symbol of sanity and normalcy of a country able to protect its historic flora.
While the botanical gardens have been discarded and abandoned, funding amounting to hundreds of millions of shekels has been approved as part of coalition deals for those sectors with the best connections. Settlements in Judea and Samaria were inevitably at the top of the list.
So, for example, the chairman of HaBayit HaYehudi, Minister of Education Naftali Bennett, demanded and received an additional 33 million shekels (about $8.5 million) to provide security for Jewish institutions in East Jerusalem, and another 45 million shekels ($11 million) for the Division of Jewish Settlement. Meanwhile, Knesset member Bezalel Smotrich of the same party was able to obtain 2 million shekels (about $516,000) for a fund to protect the open lands in Judea and Samaria. Smotrich was quick to celebrate this personal victory on his Facebook page and in a speech he delivered to the Knesset plenum, even though it wasn’t quite clear what the term “open lands” actually means. The target of that particular budget seemed rather amorphous. Furthermore, Smotrich was promised even more money for seminaries that teach Land of Israel studies and for religious institutions, as well as grants for local authorities in Judea and Samaria.
