Opposition Files 32,000 Budget Objections, 0 Sedition Objections

“This will lead to violence,” said Meretz MK Ilan Gilon, referring to an act that froze the bank accounts and seized documents of groups and individuals involved in fomenting violence.

Jerusalem, November 17 – In advance of deliberations over the national budget the Opposition has submitted a record number of objections to the proposed spending package, while in reaction to the government banning an organization that calls for the destruction of the Jewish State and incites violence, few Opposition voices have come down unequivocally in favor of the move.

The 32,000 objections will, if addressed in full, require nearly 300 hours of voting, and effectively hamstring budget legislation. The activities of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, an offshoot of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, prompted a far less enthusiastic level of objection, with the exception of the ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu Party. Several Opposition legislators went so far as to defend the Islamic Movement, calling the ban repressive and antidemocratic.

“This will lead to violence,” said Meretz MK Ilan Gilon, referring to an act that froze the bank accounts and seized documents of groups and individuals involved in fomenting violence. “Unfortunately, we have grown accustomed to this government trampling rights and ignoring real social needs,” he added, evidently not referring to the budget, which includes massive allocations for welfare, education, and economic development.

Joint Arab List MKs were especially vocal this morning in denouncing the ban, and to a lesser degree the budget, yet strangely silent on the Islamic Movement’s efforts to destroy Jewish-Arab coexistence and undermine the very democratic system that allows Arabs to hold public office in the Jewish State. “This is an attack on all Arabs,” declared MK Ahmad Tibi, referring not to the organization that threatens Arab welfare by pitting the Jewish majority against them, but to the government’s efforts to curtail incitement and violence.

Opposition leader Isaac Herzog withheld judgment on the banning of the Islamic Movement’s Northern Branch, which has been linked to  – and allegedly received funding from – the terrorist organization Hamas. However, he unleashed a full measure of venom on the proposed budget, calling it cruel, antisocial, antidemocratic, and myriad other derogatory descriptions that could easily apply to the Islamic Movement, but, for some yet unknown reason, has only emerged from Opposition mouths in relation to the ban itself, not the manifestly violent and antidemocratic organization subject to it.

Herzog underscored his opposition to the budget by scheduling a marathon Knesset session to debate the bill, then not attending, an example followed by 111 of the other 119 MKs. Instead, the Zionist Union chairman spent the morning posing awkwardly for photographs with vendors at Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market.