The government may have given in to one of the opposition and opposition-within-the-coalition’s demands, to release the gas plan to the public, but that’s unlikely to get them the votes they need.

When the coalition could not get enough votes to move the government’s gas plan forward Monday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed to have no choice but to postpone the vote indefinitely and to capitulate to the opposition and opposition-within-the-coalition’s fairly reasonable demand for transparency. There surely were quite a few people in the opposition patting themselves on the back and claiming a victory on Monday, when Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz presented the details of the government’s gas plan in a press conference and gave the public three weeks to submit comments.

There’s still a chance that a majority of the Knesset won’t be willing to vote in favor unless something else changes, because transparency, in this case, is nothing but a smokescreen for the real reasons the gas plan is stalled. Continue reading