Government ministers on Sunday voted to allocate NIS 25 million (roughly $7 million) for the establishment of the Jewish National Identity Authority headed by MK Avi Maoz, a deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s Office.
The vote was conducted over WhatsApp, Hebrew media outlet Ynet reported, and comes just two days before the 2024 state budget must be submitted to a vote in the Knesset.
According to the Hebrew daily Haaretz, at least NIS 5 million of the earmarked funds are expected to be used for projects that are already addressed by other government bodies.
This includes NIS 2 million for the promotion of a stronger connection to Jerusalem, though a Jerusalem Affairs Ministry already exists. An additional NIS 3 million will go toward the “issue of Jewish national identity in the Negev and the Galilee,” even though the Negev and Galilee Ministry deals with exactly that subject.
Maoz, the far-right MK who will head the authority, is a divisive figure in Israeli politics, and the sole Knesset representative of the anti-LGBTQ Noam party.
A former leader of the movement to bring Soviet Jews to Israel, Maoz now advocates tightening eligibility requirements to be closer to the Orthodox definition of Jewishness. His Noam party campaigned its way to the Knesset on a slew of anti-LGBT, anti-Jewish pluralist and misogynistic stances. He has said he wants control over external school programming to increase “transparency” to parents.
Following the 2022 national election, Maoz signed a coalition deal giving him a host of powers influencing the government’s stance on Israel’s Jewish identity and values by way of a new unit in the Prime Minister’s Office for Jewish National Identity which would receive NIS 440 million ($125 million) over its first two years.
He later quit the government, complaining that he was “shocked to find there was no serious intention of honoring the coalition deal” making him a deputy minister with powers to establish “Jewish identity” programs in a new Jewish National Identity office.
He subsequently rejoined the coalition and was reappointed to his role as deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s Office following the passage of the 2023 state budget, which allocated NIS 120 million ($32 million) in 2023, and an extra NIS 165 million ($44 million) in 2024.
Following Hamas’s onslaught in southern Israel on October 7 in which 1,200 people were slaughtered and 253 taken hostage to Gaza, sparking the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, Maoz announced that about NIS 120 million from the Jewish National Identity Authority would be transferred through the Prime Minister’s Office to support the war effort.
After Sunday’s vote, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid slammed the government for allocating the funds to Maoz’s authority rather than to evacuees, soldiers or “businesses that collapsed during the war.”
“A government that has lost its way,” Lapid wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
MK Orit Farkash-Hacohen, from the National Unity party — a former opposition party that joined the emergency coalition formed after October 7 — also slammed the decision as a “disgrace,” arguing that “nothing has changed” since Maoz declared that his department’s budget must be used for the needs of the war.
In December, the Finance Ministry reportedly recommended closing 10 superfluous government ministries to cover a wartime budget shortfall of NIS 70 billion ($20 billion).
Critics allege that the government’s proposed 2024 amended budget allocates funds to coalition-linked interests while slashing spending for society at large.
Carrie Keller-Lynn contributed to this report.