On a night that should have been devoted to shoring up national resilience, the Knesset instead witnessed a transaction that exposed both the moral bankruptcy of the coalition and the feebleness of those tasked with combatting it. Some 800 million shekels were redirected into the coffers of Haredi parties, money that critics argue would have been far better spent on reinforcing bomb shelters, expanding housing support, providing subsidies for reservists who have been heroically baring the burden of national defense for over two years. The process was not clumsy or accidental: it was surgical, deliberate and cloaked in procedural nimbleness. The cunning parliamentary tactics deployed caused the opposition to vote in favor of transferring the money through confusion and ineptitude of their leadership.

This is not merely a story of one government doing what it promised to do. Coalition politics are supposed to produce coherent policy. Nor should the primary outrage simply be that public funds were allocated........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)