Gangster Blackmail as Israel Fights For Its Very Survival! Goldknopf has repeatedly issued ultimatums linking the budget to the enlistment issue

 While cautioning that the party will not make any final decision before obtaining guidance from its rabbinic leadership aka money fressers,(keeping their businesses running with empty chairs is not good for their bottom line - rather keep them bums in the streets of Tel-Aviv up to no good) -- Goldknopf declared that the enlistment bill should be prioritized as a condition for the government’s continuation, and that it should “be made clear to the general public” that unless it is passed before the budget, the enlistment bill “will never be enacted.”

 

Haredi party threatens to topple government unless it gets NIS 1 billion for yeshivas

 

Writing to cabinet secretary, UTJ chief Goldknopf demands ‘immediate’ action on issue to ensure his party backs the crucial state budget; previous ultimatums haven’t been acted on

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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, and Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf, right, arriving for a cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem 

 

Housing Minister Yitzchak Goldknopf, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, threatened on Friday to oppose the 2025 state budget, which would topple the government, unless it allocates more than a billion shekels in coalition funds for Haredi yeshivas.

It is Goldknopf’s second threat to the continued stability of the coalition in less than a week, and the latest in a string of Haredi ultimatums that so far have all been backed down from.

In a letter to Cabinet Secretary Yossi Fuchs published by the Ynet news site, Goldknopf complained that while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had recently promised him the money, it were not included in a list of coalition funds set to be approved by the cabinet on Sunday morning.

Goldknopf called on Fuchs to rectify the situation “immediately” in order to ensure his support for the budget in the Knesset.

The 2025 state budget must be passed by the end of March or the government will automatically fall, triggering early elections.

According to the Kan public broadcaster, the cabinet is expected to approve NIS 1.3 billion ($370 million) in coalition funds for yeshiva budgets to the ultra-Orthodox in the coming days. Responding to Kan’s report, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid accused the government of “corruption,” describing the Haredi educational funds as “loot.”

Last week, ultra-Orthodox radio station Kol Hai reported that Netanyahu and Smotrich had offered he coalition’s Haredi parties concessions on the 2025 state budget in order to secure their agreement for the postponement of the passage of a law exempting yeshiva students from military service.

According to the report, Netanyahu and Smotrich offered the Haredi parties a 15 percent increase in the budgets of ultra-Orthodox school networks, as well as additional funding for kindergarten teachers, under the government’s Ofek Hadash (New Horizon) plan

The enlistment crisis

Goldknopf’s latest threat against the budget comes only days after he warned that he would topple the government if it does not approve a law largely excluding the ultra-Orthodox from IDF conscription prior to the passage of the state budget.

According to a report Wednesday in the Hamodia daily, which is affiliated with Goldknopf’s Gur Hasidic movement, the UTJ chief complained during a faction meeting in the Knesset that a bill enshrining yeshiva students’ military exemptions should have been passed a long time ago, but Netanyahu’s government has repeatedly given “excuses” and postponed its advancement.

“We have two options before us: either they put off the conscription bill and we go to summer elections, or they insist on the conscription bill before the budget and the government completes its term,” Goldknopf insisted.

While cautioning that the party will not make any final decision before obtaining guidance from its rabbinic leadership, Goldknopf declared that the enlistment bill should be prioritized as a condition for the government’s continuation, and that it should “be made clear to the general public” that unless it is passed before the budget, the enlistment bill “will never be enacted.”

According to Hebrew press reports, at the weekly cabinet meeting last week, Netanyahu indicated that the budget would be passed first. In response, Goldknopf was said to have asked rhetorically why his party was remaining in the government.

In June, the High Court of Justice ruled that the government must draft ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students into the military since there was no longer any legal framework to continue the decades-long practice of granting them blanket exemptions from army service.

Haredi leaders vehemently oppose members of the community serving in the military, fearing they will be secularized. The issue, long a sensitive one in Israeli public discourse due to the perceived inequality created by the blanket exemption, has taken on renewed urgency as the military is short of manpower amid a multifront war.

Ultra-Orthodox students study at the Ponevezh Yeshiva in Bnei Brak

 

Under pressure from his ultra-Orthodox allies, Netanyahu has repeatedly promised a quick resolution to the issue in recent months.

Despite the prime minister’s assurances, a bill dealing with the issue of enlistment is currently stuck in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, whose chairman, Likud MK Yuli Edelstein, has stated that he will “only produce a real conscription law that will significantly increase the IDF’s conscription base.”

A history of threats

Goldknopf has repeatedly issued ultimatums linking the budget to the enlistment issue but has failed to follow through.

In October, UTJ appeared to backtrack from a threat to derail state budget talks only hours after demanding that the government quickly pass a new conscription law.

Instead, the party’s rabbinic leadership reportedly instructed the party leadership to focus on a bill aimed at circumventing a High Court ruling that such financial support is illegal in cases where the father should be serving in the Israel Defense Forces but is not.

The party later issued a public warning that it would boycott all votes on coalition legislation if the bill was not advanced. However, due to opposition from coalition lawmakers, Netanyahu was forced to remove the bill from the Knesset agenda, and UTJ continued to vote with the coalition.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews protest against mandatory enlistment outside an IDF Recruitment Center in Jeursalem,

In December, Agudat Yisrael, Goldknopf’s faction within UTJ, threatened to oppose a key budget bill, demanding that the coalition meet their demands before they begin voting with it again.

However, Likud officials managed to head off opposition by two members of Agudat Yisrael, with MKs Yisrael Eichler and Moshe Roth staying away rather than voting against the coalition, denying what would have been a rare victory to the opposition. UTJ’s Yaakov Tessler voted with the opposition.

In a similar move, last month, Aryeh Deri, the chairman of the Haredi Shas party, warned Netanyahu that he had two months to resolve the status of yeshiva students or “we’ll go to elections.”

The following day, Shas spokesman Asher Medina walked the statement back, telling Channel 12 that his party would “not topple the right-wing government. There is no threat and no ultimatum.”

https://www.timesofisrael.com/haredi-party-threatens-to-topple-government-unless-it-gets-nis-1-billion-for-yeshivas/?

BIBI ---- He's Talkin' to You! You Could Be The Next Zelensky Set Up, Ambushed, and Defunded! * I found his warnings that Israel stands to be deeply harmed by the Trump administration’s embrace of dictatorships and by what he believes to be the Musk-Trump assault on the fundamental functioning of the United States to be important and worrying.*

 

* How Many Soldiers Will Die To Free The Living Hostages? ACT NOW - Take Over Gaza - DeNuke Iran - You Can Not Count On Trump Tomorrow! PM *

 "In that vein, he also talked about Zionists having looked back at thousands of years of Jewish history and accurately recognized that “there has to be a state.” By contrast, “the people who are now running my country,” he said, are engaged in “the self-destruction of American state capacity.”

Israel depends upon a functioning US. Trump and Musk are destroying it

 

A deeply disturbing interview with the Yale historian, famed for offering 20th century lessons for protecting today’s democracies. 

 

I had been trying for several weeks to arrange an interview with American historian Timothy Snyder. I wanted to speak to him in particular about a bestselling book he wrote, “On Tyranny,” that offers “Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” that might help prevent the collapse of democracies.

The short volume includes advice about not making it easy for leaderships who are bent on authoritarianism by preemptively consenting to their goals, defending targeted institutions, remembering professional ethics, and not confusing dangerous nationalism with commendable patriotism. One of the many memorable epithets from the text that stuck in my mind was: “A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best… A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals.”

Not everything in the book has obvious relevance for an Israel whose democratic institutions are under attack by the coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But much of it has — certainly with regard to the growing concentration of power in the hands of a single leader and the ongoing attempts by his coalition to radically constrain the judiciary.

As it turned out, the date we set for the (Zoom) interview, February 20, coincided with the return by Hamas of what it said were the bodies of four slain hostages — Oded Lifshitz, Shiri Bibas, Ariel Bibas and Kfir Bibas — and we were speaking as Israel’s national forensic institute was in the process of establishing whether Hamas had indeed sent home the four bodies it had promised. It had not.

The sheer volume of breaking news since that day meant I only found the time to write up the Snyder interview now, a week later. And the news keeps moving, of course: As I was reading over this piece before publication, US President Donald Trump was publicly berating Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office — a staggering confrontation that, as you read on, you will gather would have dismayed but probably not surprised Snyder.

A professor at Yale specializing in Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and the Holocaust, who sits on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee of Conscience, Snyder has been to Israel and has lots of friends here, but took pains in our interview to stress that he is not an expert on Israel and its current affairs. “It doesn’t make sense to ask me about detailed Israeli things,” he said, but “what I can do is apply different kinds of knowledge to the predicaments that you describe.”

 

Demonstrators gather in New York’s Union Square - One of the protesters holds a placard with a quotation from Timothy Snyder’s book “On Tyranny.” New York, February 17, 2025

 

Our conversation wound up not focusing very much on the Israeli coalition’s judicial overhaul and, indeed, took several unpredictable turns — to the point where, at the end, Snyder noted that “It may not have been what you were looking for, but I hope it was of interest.”

Indeed it was.

I found his warnings that Israel stands to be deeply harmed by the Trump administration’s embrace of dictatorships and by what he believes to be the Musk-Trump assault on the fundamental functioning of the United States to be important and worrying.

And I was intrigued by his suggestion that Netanyahu might be among the world leaders most capable — if not the best-placed of all — when it comes to trying to talk Trump out of policies that are not in the American interest and, by extension, not in Israel’s interest either. If Netanyahu is trying to humor the president and scared of crossing him, “I would find that worrisome,” he said. Israel’s leaders, he elaborated dryly, might want to “counsel the United States that it’s not a good idea to disassemble your national security apparatus… or to fire your best generals.”

“In terms of the long structural relationship, Israel depends upon a functioning United States,” Snyder stressed. “More important than the particular goodies that Trump might give you right now,” he said, “is whether, in 2030, the United States is actually going to be capable of doing basic things.”

In that vein, he also talked about Zionists having looked back at thousands of years of Jewish history and accurately recognized that “there has to be a state.” By contrast, “the people who are now running my country,” he said, are engaged in “the self-destruction of American state capacity.”

The Times of Israel: It’s an awful day in Israel because they returned four bodies of hostages, including the Bibas family. I assume you’ve followed a bit. They’re just waiting to confirm the identities of them. 

I know you’re incredibly busy and I appreciate that you found some time. I want to set up the context in which I wanted to speak to you. Forgive me if I’m telling you stuff that’s really obvious to you.

This is a country that’s been in a war for 16 months after an invasion by Hamas terrorists, and 1,200 people killed, and hostages abducted, and there are lots of people around Israel trying to murder us and, in many cases, to wipe out Israel. And they have lots of support internationally. We’re facing an incredibly oppressive region, as has always been the case.

At the same time, we have a very problematic, divisive government that, it seems to me, is battering away at the pillars of our democracy. As you probably know, we don’t have a constitution in Israel. We don’t have a strong, independent legislature because the majority coalition controls parliament. We only, therefore, have the executive, really, and the judiciary. The judiciary is pretty feisty and independent, but the current coalition is trying to undo that. It’s trying to oversee almost the entire process for choosing judges, and to limit the capacity of the Supreme Court to intervene on anything. Basically, the only thing protecting any individual rights from the political majority is the judiciary, and they’re under assault.

So that’s the context. And I wanted your insights, echoes, and lessons we might learn from other eras and other parts of the world.

How worried are you as a scholar in America about what Trump is doing in America? And what we should make of Trump, therefore, who is being very supportive of Israel at the moment.

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. There are relationships where one person gives the other person everything they want, and that’s not necessarily a healthy relationship because maybe we shouldn’t get all the things that we want. I think Gaza here is a good example, where Israelis might think, okay, well, Trump is showing his general sympathy by saying that he wants to ethnically cleanse everybody from Gaza and build a bunch of hotels.

Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University and the author of books including “Bloodlands” and “The Road to Unfreedom,” speaks in Kharkiv, Ukraine, September 8, 2024.

 

You could read that as general sympathy, or you could just read it as someone who has crossed over from pro-right-wing Israeli political instincts into absolute madness. And that if something like that were actually attempted, it could not possibly be understood as pro-Israeli. Not that it is going to happen, by the way, because these are all just fancies. But if something like that actually happened, that would break precisely the Israeli Arab reconciliations that have happened over the course of the last 15 years or so. That’s the one thing.

The other thing is that the Israeli-American relationship has always depended upon the American state capacity to do various things. But the crucial story of the Trump administration so far is the self-destruction of American state capacity.

So if Israelis in the future are expecting things like arms deliveries in crucial times, or they’re expecting the ability to broker peace talks or whatever, the Trump administration has essentially fired everybody who has the confidence to do that kind of thing, and the prospects are for more of that.

Trump is making the United States dysfunctional. And at that point, it becomes a little bit academic whether he’s pro-Israel or anti-Israel or whatever, because there isn’t going to be the capability anymore

This sort of … libertarian-style America is going to be dysfunctional and not capable of the things that Israel has been used to, whether we’re talking about 1967 or 1973 or whether we’re talking about 2023. I don’t think this America is going to be capable of those kinds of things. I would suspect that’s the thing about Trump which maybe hasn’t reached Israel yet: that he’s making the United States dysfunctional. And at that point, it becomes a little bit academic whether he’s pro-Israel or anti-Israel or whatever, because there isn’t going to be the capability anymore.

But if you’re asking me, as an American, what I think: I think it’s bad for Israel that the United States is now taking the side of dictatorships around the world. That’s not going to create an environment which is going to be helpful for Israeli democracy. And I take democracy to be in the interest of Israel.

Elon Musk is the most powerful person in the United States now, not Donald Trump

You’re describing a Trump, who I’m sure you were troubled by in 2020, as, nonetheless, a very different and more dangerous president now?

There are two basic differences to start with. Number one, Elon Musk is the most powerful person in the United States now, not Donald Trump. And we didn’t have that factor in 2016. We didn’t have somebody who was determined to neuter American public administration or the American civil service. And we have that now. We have somebody whose life’s mission essentially is to make American government dysfunctional. That’s something which is new.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk with his son X Æ A-Xii join US President Donald Trump as he signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, February 11, 2025.

And the second thing that we didn’t have the last time around is that we didn’t have a Trump who was completely surrounded by people who would actually do the things that he says he wants them to do.

 READ ALL OF IT:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/tim-snyders-warning-israel-depends-upon-a-functioning-us-trump-and-musk-are-destroying-it/?