Wartime Legislative Blitz

The Israeli government has pushed forward with a series of controversial bills aimed at appeasing the narrow sectoral interests of coalition partners. This legislative blitz comes amid the fourth week of war with Iran, as the IDF manages multiple active fronts and Israeli citizens grapple with daily intermittent aerial attacks.

Shlomo Karhi’s Media Overhaul

Having passed a first reading in November 2025, Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi’s media reform bill is currently in committee discussion in preparation for its second and third plenum votes.

This legislation—Karhi’s flagship initiative—will upend Israel’s media landscape. The bill will create a new regulatory body to oversee commercial audiovisual and television outlets and measure ratings; it would not impact print, radio, or the Kan public broadcaster. It would eliminate the broadcast-licensing process and replace it with a simple registration, while doing away with the requirement that channels run news operations through distinct companies. Under the current system, this separation reduces owners’ abilities to influence coverage.

Karhi claims that this reform will enable the democratization of the media and increase competition. Critics claim that the reform may enable the proliferation of new outlets, yet at the same time will eliminate quality controls and create an environment more conducive to bias, lower-quality reporting, and private financial interests. It also loosens restrictions that prevent the creation of large media conglomerates that dominate the landscape. 

While many in Israel see a real need to reform Israel’s uneven media regulation, the current bill has sparked widespread concern of an effort to reduce freedom of the press and increase the power of the Communications Ministry. Notably, Karhi has framed the legislation as an attempt to “punish” the media for creating polarization that led to October 7. In parallel, he is pushing for a bill to control the budget of public broadcaster Kan, whose editorial stance is often critical of the government, and has championed the government’s efforts to shut down IDF radio station Galatz for similar reasons. 

In another move that sparked controversy, this week Karhi removed a provision from the bill that would require streaming platforms to invest a certain amount in local production due to pressure from the Trump administration.

Tax Breaks for West Bank Settlers

On March 24, the Knesset passed the first reading of a bill to grant additional tax breaks to residents of West Bank settlements facing heightened security threats. The legislation would increase the number of tax-benefit points for those living in these communities by 25%, in line with those enjoyed by residents living along borders. 

While this measure was couched in language framing it as bolstering the resilience of communities facing security threats, in reality it is an ideologically motivated move aimed at improving quality of life for Israelis living deep in the West Bank, in areas that see disproportionate levels of friction with the Palestinian majority population. It dovetails with longstanding Israeli policies that subsidize life in the settlements, which would not be economically viable without such support, and ongoing efforts by Bezalel Smotrich to dramatically increase the Israeli population throughout the West Bank. 

The settlement movement and its advocates often portray the enterprise as sitting at the vanguard of protecting the country’s security. Yet since the war began, the spike in violent attacks by settlers against Palestinians—ignored, minimized, and often abated by the settler establishment and right-wing politicians—has posed an additional burden on the IDF, which had to divert an entire division away from the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Even as the government comes around to nominal measures that address settler violence, these tax benefits will strengthen communities that enabled it in the first place. 

Expanding the Power of Rabbinic Courts

On March 23, the Knesset passed a law to expand the power of Israel’s religious courts. Until now, these courts only handled religious affairs, including marriage, divorce, and conversion, along with inheritances. This legislation will now allow them to adjudicate more types of civil cases, including labor and tenant-labor disputes, effectively creating a parallel legal system that adheres to Halacha or Shari’a law and circumvents the secular courts.

Sponsored by United Torah Judaism, the bill maintains that civil cases will only pass to religious courts with consent of both parties. Yet opposition politicians across the political spectrum decried the “consent” threshold as insufficient given the strong social pressures that exist within Israel’s ultra-religious communities, which prevent individuals—women in particular—from defying communal expectations. This law strengthens the Haredi community’s effective state-within-a-state and puts it on the path to becoming a quasi-theocracy. 

For the better part of the past year, the Haredi parties have formally sat outside the Netanyahu government in protest over its failure to pass a draft law. This initiative has formally been suspended amid Operation Roaring Lion. By advancing another longstanding Haredi priority (one that is less well known, yet similarly damaging to the state’s character), the Netanyahu bloc has taken a step to reinforce its alliance with the Haredim heading into elections later this year. 

Death Penalty for Terrorists

On March 24, the Knesset’s National Security Committee advanced a bill to impose the death penalty on those convicted of terrorism, sending the legislation to the plenum for final votes. This bill is a longstanding priority of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir and his Otzma Yehudit party. Since its first Knesset vote several months ago, the legislation was softened to allow judges to opt for life imprisonment in lieu of the death penalty and for such cases to be adjudicated in civil rather than military courts. While the death penalty formally exists in Israeli law, this law would pave the way for a dramatic increase of the practice against those accused of nationalistically-motivated violence against civilians. 

The proposition of imposing the death penalty as a means of deterring would-be Islamist terror attackers is a dubious one, given that perpetrators and their supporters glorify martyrdom and embrace death in service of their cause. The bill is also implicitly targeted at Palestinian terrorists and will, in effect, not apply to extremist Jews; the wording refers to those who kill Israelis with the intent of “harming the State of Israel and the revival of the Jewish people.”

Looking Forward

It is highly irregular for an Israeli government to advance legislation that promotes narrow political and sectoral interests during wartime; even in the aftermath of October 7, this same government temporarily paused the controversial judicial overhaul package. Motivating this blitz is an understanding that the coalition’s legislative clock is running out heading into the Passover recess and the upcoming election season. Their success in pushing these bills highlights the Netanyahu bloc’s resilience in the face of internal rifts—along with the opposition’s ongoing failure to drive a deeper wedge among their rival parties or mount a unified response. Yet the government’s determination to advance these measures during wartime could have the unintended consequence of further alienating moderate-right voters who have grown frustrated with the Haredi community’s influence over politics.