Mr. Netanyahu’s allies say the storm over ultra-Orthodox education has been overhyped by a hostile news media.
“The budgets for Haredi education constitute maybe half a percent of the entire budget,” Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, said in a speech to Parliament on Tuesday night.
But “99 percent of the reporting will be about the budget for the Haredim, and less than half a percent will be about the rest, because they do not want you to know the truth,” he added. “This budget is good for all the citizens of Israel — left and right, religious, ultra-Orthodox and secular, Druze, Arabs.”
The entire budget covers all state spending, including on the military, transport and infrastructure, and will proe ministries with roughly $270 billion over two years. Among other measures, it has increased funds to the national security ministry, led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right former activist, and set up a new food stamp program.
The government also said the budget would help bring down the cost of living, a claim disputed by the opposition.
In his memoir last year, Mr. Netanyahu wrote that he had been prepared to cut subsidies and maintain fiscal discipline in the 2000s because “I was willing to risk my political future for it.”
Now, political commentators say that is no longer the case. Mr. Netanyahu’s four-seat majority in Parliament is dependent on two ultra-Orthodox political parties. If they had voted against the budget, as some of their leaders threatened, the government would automatically have fallen, setting the stage for new elections.
