Opposition MKs voted to allocate NIS 800 million for Haredi schools. How did that happen?

In the early hours of Monday morning, while most Israelis were sleeping, the Knesset finally passed the 2026 state budget, raising defense spending to unprecedented levels amid the war with Iran and earmarking billions of shekels to Haredi educational institutions and other priorities of the governing coalition.

During the course of the evening, lawmakers spent hours voting on a series of so-called “reservations,” most of them objections to the budget submitted by opposition lawmakers, which were roundly defeated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition.

However, shortly after midnight, as lawmakers’ focus began to fade, the coalition inserted a surprise reservation onto the agenda to allocate approximately NIS 800 million ($255 million) to ultra-Orthodox programs and institutions, including yeshivas.

Because reservations are typically filed by the opposition as a procedural tactic to delay budget votes, opposition MKs appeared to treat the measure as routine and automatically backed it, failing to notice that the coalition was also supporting it. Before opposition lawmakers realized their error, the added funding was approved, with a lopsided 107-4 vote.

In total, according to a tally by Channel 13, the move — which followed the recent approval of billions of shekels in coalition funds for Haredi education — enabled the further expansion of already-boosted allocations to Haredi educational institutions by more than NIS 1 billion, from NIS 4.1 billion ($1.3 billion) to NIS 5.17 billion ($1.65 billion).

The gambit came after the ultra-Orthodox parties agreed to support the budget despite the coalition’s failure to pass the bill they demanded enshrining blanket exemptions from military conscription for yeshiva students.

The allocations to Haredi budget priorities appeared to deliver funding that Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara had previously blocked due to the lack of ultra-Orthodox conscription.

Baharav-Miara and the Knesset opposition have devoted considerable effort to blocking Haredi educational budgets in light of widespread draft evasion among yeshiva students and a lack of state-mandated core curriculum studies at elementary and high school-level institutions.

This has led to several high-profile setbacks, including a December 2025 ruling by the High Court of Justice blocking the transfer of some NIS 1 billion ($314 million) to ultra-Orthodox schools accused of not teaching core curriculum subjects as required by law, sparking fury among Haredi lawmakers.

The court subsequently ordered the state to provide information on core curriculum studies and oversight in the ultra-Orthodox school system.

A short-term victory?

The additional budgets contained in the “reservation” would almost certainly have passed with only coalition support, regardless of the opposition’s mistaken yes votes.

However, opposition support was seen as a bonus by Haredi lawmakers, who appeared primarily concerned with obtaining Knesset approval for the funds without drawing the attention of opposition lawmakers or Knesset legal advisers who likely would have objected to the measure.

Speaking with The Times of Israel, Haredi political sources explained that they had wanted to hide the funds and had worked hard, in coordination with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, to keep them from the public eye.

However, Monday early morning’s “victory” appears likely to prove extremely short-lived. As soon as the reservation was approved, a furor predictably erupted, with reports highlighting the underhanded allocation of still more public funds during war to a community which opposes military service and largely eschews secular education.

In response, the attorney general almost immediately froze the funds, while the opposition vowed to thwart the extra allocations by petitioning the High Court.

A ‘parliamentary maneuver’

In the immediate aftermath of the vote, one senior official with the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party crowed that the coalition had smoothly outflanked the opposition. The vote, the official added, had “proven that there’s no substitute for the experience of our veteran MKs, who once again taught the opposition a thing or two about parliamentary maneuvers.”

Elaborating on his party colleague’s point, a spokesman for UTJ’s MK Moshe Gafni, the former longtime chairman of the Knesset Finance Committee, said that Haredi lawmakers “know every clause and every subject in the regulations, and someone like Gafni, with his seniority and experience, knows exactly how to do it.”

“The coalition can also insert a small number of reservations…and he did it together with the coalition whip [Likud MK Ofir Katz] and Smotrich’s guys,” the spokesman said, adding that they had managed to keep the gambit a secret for three weeks.

“To tell you the truth, regarding the opposition, we were really worried someone there would discover it, but apparently, we thought they were more talented than they actually are. How did they not find it? I don’t know. We tucked it inside the pages. They didn’t even bother to go over it,” he said, bragging that not since 2024’s “beeper operation” against Hezbollah in Lebanon had a secret “been kept for so long.”

“Had our faction not noticed the maneuver, more opposition members would have continued to vote with the coalition,” the majority-Arab Hadash-Ta’al party said in a statement on Monday, claiming credit for the belated realization that the opposition was being duped.

Asked how nobody noticed the reservation ahead of time, a spokesman for Hadash chairman Ayman Odeh replied, “We’re asking the same question. Because it’s essentially the role of the opposition coordinator to update us on everything, and they clearly missed it.”

‘I was not vigilant’

The coordinator in question was Yesh Atid legislator Meirav Ben-Ari, who sent a lengthy apology to fellow opposition MKs on WhatsApp, taking “full responsibility” for the mistaken vote.

“This is my ninth budget. I have managed thousands of reservations. This time I was not vigilant and I was wrong,” she said, prompting sympathetic replies from colleagues.

In a series of social media posts, Ben Ari rebuffed efforts to blame the opposition for the vote, speaking out against what she described as “attempts to turn the event against the opposition.”

The real story, she and other opposition figures argued, was the “theft” of public funds on behalf of draft dodgers and schools that do not conform to educational standards.

“Those who stole the public’s money last night are the corrupt coalition. Smotrich and Deri acted in cahoots,” Ben Ari tweeted, referring to Aryeh Deri, the chairman of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party.

In a post on X, Yesh Atid chairman and opposition leader Yair Lapid accused the coalition of celebrating “the fact that it is stealing money from Israeli citizens and transferring it to the corrupt and draft dodgers.” He promised to continue “fighting” and “never give up.”

Demanding legal intervention

This statement was followed by letters to senior legal officials, including Finance Ministry legal advisor Dudi Kopel, demanding the release of legal opinions declaring the allocation unlawful.

In a letter to Knesset legal adviser Sagit Afik and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, a law firm representing Yesh Atid argued that the vote on the reservation constituted an attempt to “bypass the legal prohibition” on transferring funds to Torah institutions for yeshiva students who did not receive an exemption, and was “another example of a government seeking to trample on the rule of law.”

On Monday evening, Baharav-Miara responded, halting the transfer of the funds and stating that the vote was indeed an attempt to circumvent the High Court’s ruling.

Following Baharav-Miara’s update, Yesh Atid announced it would file a petition to the High Court to permanently block the transfer, a motion which, in light of other recent cases, is likely to succeed.

Jeremy Sharon contributed to this report.