Only 1 lawmaker shows up to Knesset committee meeting on the north’s war-ruined economy
11 MKS absent from Special Committee for Strengthening and Developing the Negev and Galilee; angry residents who traveled hours for 9 a.m. meeting sneer: ‘Too early for them’
Representatives of northern businesses were left fuming Wednesday when the chair of a Knesset committee was the only lawmaker to show up to a meeting on the impact of cross-border fighting with Lebanese terror group Hezbollah.
National Unity MK Michael Biton was the only member of the Special Committee for Strengthening and Developing the Negev and Galilee to attend the meeting, along with representatives from government ministries.
“It was a very difficult feeling to see the empty seats and think that we, in the north, are not important enough to those sitting in the Knesset,” Inbar Bezek, director of the Economic Company for the Development of the Upper Galilee, told reporters.
Bezek, a former MK, said that a delegation of residents from the Upper Galilee set off at 4 a.m. in order to be at the Knesset for the 9 a.m. start of the meeting.
“It seems nine in the morning is too early for them,” she remarked of missing committee members.
“The Knesset has another 119 members and not one of them took a look at the debate and thought that it was important enough to come,” she said.
ובמיקום אחר, בירושלים המנותקת. חכ"ל ענבר בזק, מנכלית החברה הכלכלית גליל עליון מספרת כעת: "יצאנו הבוקר בשעה 4 מהגליל העליון לדיון בכנסת בנושא פגיעה בעסקים בצפון בעקבות מלחמת חרבות ברזל ופיצוי לעסקים בצפון. לדיון לא הגיע אפילו ח"כ אחד! למעט יו"ר הועדה מיכאל ביטון. כנראה 9:00 בבוקר… pic.twitter.com/ZyDZTKSvxp
— יאיר קראוס (@yair_kraus) March 27, 2024
Speaking to Radio 103FM, Biton said his fellow lawmakers were not doing enough for residents of the north.
“Knesset members need to mobilize for the north,” he said, calling for “presence and vigorous action.”
“Unfortunately, the state is snoozing when it comes to the north,” he added.
The empty seats at the table were first reported by the Ynet outlet. As the news spread in Hebrew media, three MKs turned up for the last few minutes of the meeting — Yesh Atid MK Tatiana Mazarsky, MK Almog Cohen of Otzma Yehudit, and Ofer Cassif of the Hadash-Tal alliance.
Responding to media inquiries, most of the other 12 committee members explained that they were attending other meetings in the Knesset. MK Moshe Rut of United Torah Judaism did not respond to a question by Ynet.
The outlet noted that committee members could have asked Biton to reschedule the gathering.
Negev, Galilee and National Resilience Minister Yitzhak Wasserlauf of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, who is not a member of the committee, also did not attend the meeting, though he, like any other MK could have.
Ynet noted that meetings about financial difficulties for businesses and factories are usually held in the Knesset finance or economics committees. In addition, Wednesdays are a particularly busy day for meetings at the Knesset.
During the meeting, attendees from the north spoke of the financial failure they are facing with businesses collapsed due to the cross-border fighting with the Lebanon-based terror group Hezbollah.
“Alongside the security threat and the crumbling of the communities in the north, slowly, slowly, under the radar, the economy in the north is collapsing,” Bezek told the committee.
Bezek noted that tourism businesses have closed and that hundreds of workers are expected to be fired in the coming weeks.
Factories will shut down if the government doesn’t step in to help, putting thousands of workers out of their jobs, she warned.
Amit Sofer, mayor of the Marom Hagalil Regional Council, said that since January, the state has only dealt with those who were evacuated from the north, but not the “indirect damage of the war.”
He urged the government to reinstate indemnities that had been applied until December and to extend their range to apply to businesses beyond a current 5.5-kilometer distance from the border, as enterprises over twice that distance are also suffering.
Since October 8, Hezbollah-led forces have attacked Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a near-daily basis with rockets, drones, anti-tank missiles, and other means, with the group saying it is doing so to support Gaza amid the war against Hamas there. Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy in Lebanon, and Palestinian terror groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are also backed by Tehran.
The IDF has regularly responded with strikes in Lebanon while saying it will no longer tolerate Hezbollah’s presence on the frontier, warning of war in the north should ongoing international efforts fail to remove the terror group’s forces from the border area.
As a precaution, Israel evacuated tens of thousands of residents from the north, impacting local businesses that are struggling to continue operations. Hezbollah fired a barrage of dozens of rockets Wednesday, one of which killed a man in an industrial building in the northern border town Kiryat Shmona.
