Fireworks at the High Court

J

erusalem streets on Thursday afternoons are normally nothing like Tel Aviv streets. The capital has a high concentration of state employees, who start heading out for the weekend already in the early afternoon.

But over the past two Thursdays on Jerusalem’s Kaplan Street, where the High Court, the Knesset, and government ministries stand, this comfortable routine has been disrupted. Explosive High Court hearings have been scheduled, causing headaches even for the editors of the newspaper weekend supplements, who wait to go to print until late in the day.

Last Thursday, the High Court heard a petition against the funding of the chareidi school networks of Shas and United Torah Judaism, in which the majority of chareidi students are currently educated. An old clause, added exactly 40 years ago to the Budgetary Basic Law, anchored the fiscal status of these networks with the addition of three words — kichlal yaldei Yisrael, “like all the children of Israel” — words whose value, from then until today, has ensured that chareidi children received funding parity with non-chareidi children.

Every attempt over the past decade by chareidi MKs to anchor that parity in more formal legislation has been met with unequivocal legal advice not to touch those three words, added by broad consensus during the 1980s unity government of Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres.