The Legislative Blitz We Didn’t Get

During the Knesset’s final two weeks, I watched the news scroll across my phone the way I’ve watched red alerts over these last three years: half dread, half habit. First it was a law shielding yeshiva students from arrest for draft evasion, and a bill curbing the attorney general’s authority to bind the government to her rulings. Then came a law mandating gender segregation in graduate and doctoral programs. Before the session’s end the government also passed a law that hands it much greater control over broadcast media, and for a kicker, allocated $77 million for “identity/heritage programs” via the Settlements Ministry. Four years of legislative sessions ending in a sprint that even veteran commentators struggled to describe as anything but a race to the bottom.

What struck me was not the content of any single bill; it was the machinery. Coalition discipline, procedural fluency, goal oriented no matter the cost and the public consensus be damned. Whatever one thinks of where that machinery was pointed, it worked. Laws, no matter how grotesque, suddenly passed in a week.

So I found myself doing something a little indulgent: imagining what that same machinery could produce with good intentions and pointed south.

The Negev makes up sixty percent of Israel’s land, but less than a sixth of the population and only a small fraction of its national investment. It has absorbed decades of promises, especially in days preceding elections, about “developing the Negev”, that rarely survive post-election budgets. But if the government can find the discipline to pass five contested laws in a week, it can find the discipline to pass five uncontested ones. Here is my list:

A Negev Origin Admissions Law, permitting BGU to weight admission, affirmative action if you will, to its health, therapy and engineering programs, toward applicants from the Negev. The need here is unmistakable: Physicians in the Negev serve their population at roughly 2.1 per thousand people, against 5.3 per thousand in Tel Aviv. The pattern repeats in psychology and social work, where southern clinics and school systems report waitlists that simply don’t exist in the center. Admission to BGU is so competitive that most of our applicants come from the wealthier center of the country. But unfortunately, when they graduate, most gravitate back to their homes. The best way to increase the number of physicians, social workers, engineers, and the like in the Negev is to train Negev-native students at BGU who are most likely to build their lives in the Negev. But as the Negev is not considered a population deserving special consideration, we cannot legally accept students from the Negev over others. We can’t guarantee that a meaningful share of every incoming class in medicine, nursing, therapy, social work, psychology, or engineering already calls this region home, and is more likely to stay in it.

A Negev Research and Development Investment Law, setting a binding floor, not a target, for the share of national R&D and infrastructure budgets directed to Negev-based higher education, hospitals, and industry, the way peripheral incentive laws already exist for the north.

A Bedouin Town Planning and Infrastructure Law, granting formal recognition and master planning to unrecognized Bedouin villages on a fixed timeline, with water and electricity connection guaranteed rather than litigated village by village for another generation.

A Negev Rail Law, with a binding construction timeline, not an aspirational one, connecting Beer Sheva, Dimona, and Arad to the center in under an hour, on the logic that no relocation incentive matters if the commute doesn’t work.

A Negev Relocation and Anchor Institution Law, requiring a fixed share of government offices and government-funded agencies, public broadcasting among them, along with their civilian contractors, to headquarter in the Negev, with the tax and housing incentives to make that mandate stick rather than symbolic.

None of these five would generate a headline the way gender segregation in graduate school did this past week. That is precisely the point. The laws that got the coalition’s full attention this session were the ones that served a narrow constituency loudly. The Negev has never been a loud constituency, and it has paid for that in every budget.

Unfortunately, I don’t expect the next Knesset to take up this list. But I’d like whoever campaigns for my vote over the next hundred days to explain why building the Negev’s workforce, research, and infrastructure is less urgent than the fights this one just finished having. Two weeks of that same coalition discipline, pointed south instead of at itself, is all it would take.