From the Liveblog of
Thursday, January 22, 2026
Ministers to vote on bill stripping benefits from PMs who served less than 3 years
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleSam Sokol is a former political correspondent at The Times of Israel. He was previously a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz. He is the author of "Putin’s Hybrid War and the Jews"
The Ministerial Committee for Legislation is scheduled on Sunday to vote on a proposal to restrict government benefits to former prime ministers who served less than three years in office.
The bill, sponsored by Likud MK Nissim Vaturi, is widely seen as directly targeting ex-premiers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, whose short-lived government ran Israel in 2021-2022, with each taking a turn as prime minister. Bennett is expected to be Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s main rival in the next election.
“Recently, we have found ourselves in a new situation where the position of prime minister has become a subject of political extortion,” writes Vaturi in the bill’s explanatory notes, stating that in order to rectify the situation, someone who served a short period in office should “be deprived of all his rights as a former prime minister.”
Former prime ministers are entitled to drivers, security and an office with staff as well as a state funeral. However, many of these benefits — excluding the state funeral — only come into effect if the former prime minister served for at least 18 months, making both Lapid and Bennett ineligible.
“I don’t need the benefits, but I appreciate the fact that the Israeli public is reminded that there are two more people in the State of Israel who were prime ministers, who know how to run a country, who know how to make sure that Israeli society functions, that people will enlist in the IDF, that the Israeli middle class will benefit,” Lapid says at the Democracy Day Conference at Reichman University.
The Times of Israel Community.