Broadcaster deal said to hit Finance Ministry roadblock

An agreement signed last week between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon over the future of Israel’s public broadcaster is said to have hit a major roadblock, with Finance Ministry officials saying the plan is seriously flawed and cannot be implemented.

“We can’t see how we will be able to come to agreement over the broadcaster crisis. This plan doesn’t add up and has many seemingly unsolvable problems,” a ministry source told the Calcalist financial newspaper Tuesday without elaborating.

While Kahlon and Netanyahu met five times to negotiate the deal, representatives from the Finance and Communications ministries have since been unable to agree on the specific details of both the financing and the time frame of the agreement, the report said.

The agreement Thursday headed off a coalition crisis that started in mid-March when Netanyahu backtracked on an agreement with Kahlon to launch the new public broadcasting corporation — formally called “Kan” and widely known as “the corporation” — set up through a law passed by his previous government in 2014 and slated to replace the aging Israel Broadcasting Authority.

The prime minister instead called for rehabilitating the ailing IBA. Kahlon, meanwhile, fought for the establishment of the new state broadcaster, as legislated, and with reduced government meddling.

According to the deal signed last week, in which Kahlon was largely regarded to have capitulated, the new broadcaster will be stripped entirely of its news division and a separate broadcast entity will be established to deal with all current affairs offerings.

“If Netanyahu wants to go to elections over this then we will go to elections,” the ministry source said, referring to a threat the prime minister had made to break up the coalition if agreement was not reached.

A spokesperson for the Finance Ministry denied that the comments represented an official position and said they were made by someone not involved in the process.

The report, though, would seem to be the latest in a series of challenges to throw the agreement between Netanyahu and Kahlon into question. On Monday, the High Court said the government had until Sunday to respond to two petitions claiming that the deal was reached illegally. In addition, the Histadrut labor federation, the country’s largest union, threatened to call a general strike over the agreement.

Kahlon on Monday defended the deal saying, that it prevented elections that would have harmed the country.

“If there were elections, none of you would be sitting here,” he told an audience of young couples at a ceremony marking a new state-subsidized housing project in Beit Shemesh. “You would have had to wait a year for a campaign and an election and then the government to be formed. And in elections, you know how you go in but you don’t know how you come out. No one knows.”

His comments appeared to be directed at Netanyahu, who was also attending the ceremony.

“The responsibility that we showed was required and needed, and you know what, I paid a price for it,” Kahlon said. “But when I see the young couples, I know it’s worth paying the price for them. Not everyone thinks so.”

The coalition decided on Sunday to postpone a vote on the implementation of a compromise agreement regarding the new public broadcaster until after the Passover holiday. The vote had originally been set for a special session on Wednesday, but was delayed after the Likud-led coalition realized the bill would not be ready in time.

A spokesperson for coalition chairman David Bitan told The Times of Israel on Tuesday that the bill to establish the new corporation would be passed at the beginning of May.

A spokesperson for Kan told The Times of Israel, however, that no one at the broadcaster had been informed of any of the details of the deal and that, as mandated by the current law, the corporation was still planning to begin transmissions on April 30.