Israeli Press
Netanyahu demands 50 billion shekels more for Israel's rearmament plan
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has asked to enlarge Israel's ten-year military buildup by 50 billion shekels — about 13.7 billion dollars — the Israeli financial daily Calcalist reported Friday, in a demand made at a Thursday evening meeting and now sitting on the Finance Ministry's desk.
The existing package runs to 350 billion shekels, some 96 billion dollars, over a decade. Netanyahu's request would take it to 400 billion shekels, roughly 110 billion dollars, with the spending stretched past the ten-year horizon.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich pushed back, warning that a rise on that scale points toward tax increases and questioning how the Defense Ministry spends what it already receives. "A small slice of a large cake is better than a large slice of a small cake," he said, in the account Calcalist gave of the argument.
The paper set out where the extra money would go: about 7 billion shekels for protecting communities in the north, about 12 billion for Foreign Ministry diplomacy, and tens of billions more for weapons bought in the United States.
An earlier understanding reached little more than a month ago promised the defense establishment 15 billion shekels at once and another 25 billion by the end of the year. Neither transfer has arrived.
The argument runs eleven weeks before the Knesset election of 27 October, and it fixes in a budget line what Israeli officials have said in words since the Gaza war began — that the army is being built for a decade of confrontation rather than a season of it.
