Minister faces anger after putting brakes on Shabbat buses

A row erupted Tuesday between liberal politicians and Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz (Likud) over his decision to enforce laws forbidding public buses from operating on Shabbat.

“Because of the primaries in the Likud, the transportation minister has decided that buses will stop running by Friday afternoon,” Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid said Tuesday. “I have one question, Yisrael – how are my son and his friends supposed to return on Friday from the army?”

Lapid’s criticism follows a Tuesday morning report by the Ynet news site that quoted soldiers expressing concern that they would be forced to take taxis home from far-flung IDF posts at a cost of hundreds of shekels per ride.

On Sunday, the country’s largest bus company, the Egged cooperative, announced that some intercity bus routes would stop running at an earlier hour on Friday in order to avoid conflicting with the earlier start of the Jewish Sabbath on Friday evenings due to daylight savings time.

Daylight savings went into effect in October, but most bus companies did not change their schedules, leading to many routes’ last buses on Friday arriving at their final destination after the start of the Sabbath, thus violating the law.

The decision, Egged explained, follows a decision by the Transportation Ministry to enforce the Sabbath public transportation laws and crack down on the violations of recent weeks.

In the electioneering atmosphere, the fault for this decision is being placed squarely at the feet of the transportation minister.

“Who will pay the price for this ingenius [decision]?” Meretz leader Zahava Gal-on asked rhetorically on Tuesday. “Almost exclusively soldiers who serve on distant bases and are dependent precisely on these last buses to get home for the weekend. So now they won’t have these last buses. The important thing is that they observe the Sabbath,” she added sarcastically, “and thanks to Yisrael Katz they’re going to do so on their base, where they will be trapped for the weekend. Shameful.”

Katz has vehemently denied the decision was his.

“This is a process that is taking place at the behest of ministry officials. He didn’t ask for it and he isn’t leading it,” a spokesperson for Katz told The Times of Israel Tuesday.

“Any attempt to attribute these sorts of decision to [Katz], and to suggest this is related to primaries considerations, is a lie intended to libel and cause harm,” Katz said in a statement.

The ministry said that there is nothing new in Sunday’s notice. Friday bus schedules are updated twice each year to reflect the beginning and end of daylight savings, “in keeping with the status quo” around public Sabbath observance.

It is this connection between the decision and the larger religious culture war that lends the debate its poignancy.

“Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz arrives at television studios on the Shabbat in an official government car, but the public that rides on public transportation is stuck at home,” Gil Yaakov, who heads the public transportation advocacy group 15 Minutes, told the Ynet site on Tuesday.

The public is forced to “spend a lot of money each month on taxis or is forced to buy a private vehicle, increasing the cost of living for us all,” he charged.