Cabinet Approves Budget to Dismay of Education and Health Ministers

A $29.9 billion national budget, approved Sunday by the Cabinet, has been sent to the Knesset Finance Committee, from which it is expected to emerge, after long and probably undramatic deliberations, more or less intact.

The Cabinet banded Finance Minister Moshe Nissim an important personal and political victory when it voted 18-2 to endorse his budget package for fiscal 1988, after more than five weeks of behind-the-scenes wrangling among the ministers. There were two abstentions and one minister demonstratively refused to participate in the vote.

The budget, though $5 billion over the 1987 level, calls for cutbacks in government expenditures of $463 million, only about $8 million short of the reductions originally proposed by Nissim on Nov. 30.

The two negative votes were cast by Education Minister Yitzhak Navon and Health Minister Shoshana Arbeli-Almoslino, both of Labor.

They objected strenuously to Nissim’s cuts in subsidies for health and education. The health budget will be reduced by $40.6 million from last year and the education budget by $6.25 million.

But Navon said after the Cabinet meeting that the past weeks of negotiations narrowed the gap between his ministry’s demands and the Treasury’s position. He said there was therefore no cause for him to resign, as he had threatened at one point when negotiations were at a stalemate.

Navon said last month he would quit if the budget ended free high school education in Israel. Apparently he won on that point.

But a major controversial element in Nissim’s package remains–the postponement for two years of free pre-kindergarten for children aged 3 to 4.

The two abstainers in the Cabinet vote were Laborites Aryeh Nehamkin, the minister of agriculture, and Yaacov Tsur, minister of immigration and absorption.

Both are dissatisfied with cuts in the agriculture budget.