Knesset kicks off contentious winter session Monday

The Knesset kicked off its winter session Monday as 120 MKs returned to the plenum for the first time since summer to a tense atmosphere in which a series of controversial bills are expected to test the coalition’s various parties.

Among the bills lawmakers will consider are new rules easing conversions to Judaism, a proposal to allow the Knesset to override the High Court when it strikes down some laws, and policies concerning migrants.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Reuven Rivlin, Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein, opposition head Isaac Herzog and other senior lawmakers will deliver speeches from the plenum Monday afternoon to launch the session.

The parliament’s first order of business will be passing the 2015 state budget, no small feat. Many battles have already been fought over the upcoming budget, most dramatically the fight over Finance Minister Yair Lapid’s proposal to eliminate the value-added tax on new home purchases for young couples who fulfilled their national service and are buying their first home.

Lapid and Netanyahu reached an agreement on the issue earlier this month that will see Lapid’s plan passed as a separate bill in parallel with the passage of the budget.

By law, if the budget fails to pass, the government must fall.

The Knesset is also set to hold debates about the Palestinian Authority’s expected appeal to the United Nations Security Council in the coming weeks, and possibly also one to the International Criminal Court against Israel.

Born as a response to the cost-of-living protests of 2011, Lapid’s plan seeks to tackle a key complaint of Israel’s middle class: the prohibitively high cost of buying a home. The plan has been met with much resistance.

There are already signs the government may not deliver its budget bill on time — it’s due Wednesday, October 29 — either because of new disagreements over the budget within the government or as a tactic to shorten the time the Knesset will have to add changes.

This coalition “is much more difficult than previous ones,” according to Knesset Chairman Yariv Levin, of Netanyahu’s Likud party, who said Likud’s 19 seats, slated to shrink to 18 with the retirement of Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar, make governing difficult.

“There is a small ruling party, relations are sour between the heads of parties in the coalition, and there are huge gaps between the parties” on a range of issues, he said.

Sa’ar’s last day in the Knesset is Monday, and with his departure Lapid’s Yesh Atid party will become the largest faction with 19 seats and Yisrael Beytenu will gain a thirteenth MK — Leon Litinetsky.

In such a setting, bills seeking to dramatically reform state conversion policies, surrogacy, and other issues in which religiously devout lawmakers may clash with more liberal political forces have the explosive power to topple an already wobbly coalition.

Just last week, Netanyahu informed his coalition partners that he was withdrawing his support for MK Elazar Stern’s (Hatnua) conversion bill and would not allow its passage into law.

The bill would allow Israelis to convert to Judaism through any municipal rabbinate, allowing potential converts, especially among Russian-speaking relatives of Jews who immigrated from the former Soviet Union, to bypass any state rabbi who refused to convert them and find a rabbi who would.

As with Lapid and his zero-VAT housing plan, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who heads the Hatnua party, has threatened to quit the coalition if the bill failed to pass. Indeed, it passed its first of three required votes in the Knesset plenum last summer, with Netanyahu’s support.

But Netanyahu is now calling Livni’s bluff — and hoping that even if it was not a bluff and Livni actually quits, the stymieing of a major religious reform will win back ultra-Orthodox parties that are still smarting at his decision last year to establish a government without them.

Netanyahu may also be attempting to head off a crisis not with Livni, whose six Knesset seats he can afford to lose from his 68-seat coalition, but with the Jewish Home party, whose 12 seats he cannot lose without risking his parliamentary majority.

Jewish Home is expected to resist major religious reforms, but a new report Monday revealed that the prime minister may have pacified the party and right-wing lawmakers by agreeing to approve 2,000 new housing units in the West Bank and drastically ramping up development across the Green Line, according to a Sunday report.

The report triggered criticism by Lapid, Livni and others.

On Monday, the Prime Minister’s Office announced Netanyahu would okay planning for some 1,000 new homes in East Jerusalem and new roads in the West Bank.