An annual review of the Jewish year 5786
(October 2025 – September 2026)
5786 was a year in which Kohelet’s research turned up in the statute book with unusual frequency: restaurants freed from regulations that governed buildings rather than risk, first cracks in a protected dairy market, the attorney general’s authority circumscribed, terrorists of October 7 brought within reach of prosecution. What follows are the major national reforms in which that research played a central part.
Opening Markets and Lowering Costs
Health Minister Chaim Katz signed measures easing the infrastructure, construction, and operating requirements imposed on restaurants and other food establishments, moving the regime from one that regulates buildings to one that regulates risk – preserving public-health protections while lowering the cost of opening a business, with savings projected in the billions of shekels. It is the second reform in two years to grow out of the paper by Uri Akavia and Barak Hershkovitz.
The Finance and Agriculture ministries adopted a framework opening the sheep and goat milk market to competition, after years of protective tariffs and production quotas. Tariffs on sheep cheeses go, replaced by direct support of roughly NIS 100 million over 2027–2030 and some NIS 20 million a year after, a payment that sits in the budget and can be cut, rather than a tariff hidden in the price of food. The framework tracks the position paper of Dr. Asher Meir, Adv. Ariel Erlich, and Heni Rothstein Cohen, whose work also underpinned our questions to the Finance Ministry on the broader dairy reform.
Several other reforms grounded in Kohelet research advanced this year:
>> The Knesset completed Culture Minister Miki Zohar’s cinema reform. So long as the state funds films at all, a small circle of insiders should not be awarding the money to one another: selection is now open, and part of the funding follows the box office, as Ziv Maor advocated in his 2016 paper.
>> The standards reform known as “Good for Europe,” which lets goods certified to European standards be sold in Israel without separate Israeli certification, reached its sixth wave in July 2026, covering elevators and a wide range of electrical and electronic products. A seventh wave due in January 2027 extends it to construction equipment, an entire sector that until now has relied almost entirely on Israeli standards. The reform follows the line of argument in Kohelet’s research on import regulation.
>>A clause in the Omnibus Bill (Israel’s annual Arrangements Law) now lets businesses satisfy the American fire-safety standard rather than the Israeli one, while leaving the existing track open to those already compliant – a change anticipated by the same import-regulation research Tirtza Attiya and Ran Fitoussi on and Nahshon Roth on construction licensing.
>> A bill opening the ride-sharing market to services such as Uber, which should expand supply and cut fares, passed its first reading, on groundwork laid by Sefi Keller, Tzviya Zicherman, Meir Buchnik, and Ariel Erlich. The bill awaits legislative continuity in the next Knesset.
Not every result went our way: an amendment to the Kashrut Fraud Prohibition Law ended competition among kashrut certifiers. Kohelet offered proposals for limiting the damage, and the enacted version, with MK Ohad Tal leading in committee, caps the system’s budgetary cost, allows flexible employment of supervisors, and creates an independent appeals committee.
Shrinking the State’s Footprint
Dr. Eyal Tzur’s work on broadcast regulation, including the research he produced with Dr. Yitzhak Klein and Nikolay Taleisnik, was aimed at greater transparency and efficiency, fewer harmful precedents, and stronger Knesset oversight. He testified repeatedly before the committee drafting the new broadcasting law, and several of his recommendations are reflected in its deregulatory provisions: a new authority replaces the Cable and Satellite Council and absorbs part of the Second Authority’s remit, ending a long-standing duplication; commercial channels are freed from the requirement to run separate news companies; and cross-ownership restrictions are lifted.
Three further steps followed the same logic:
>> The committee on the future of Galei Tzahal, the army radio station, built on Tzur’s paper and on testimony from him and from Adi Arbel.
>> Following Dr. Tzur’s work on eliminating stae-owned companies, the state sold off two companies and folded two others into a single company, cutting duplication and saving millions.
>> An inter-ministerial team adopted much of Ran Fitoussi’s paper on streamlining the allocation of disabled parking permits, many of which were fraudulently obtained under the old system.
Education: Flexibility, Fairness, and Parental Authority
Kohelet’s main contribution in education this year was the adoption of a plan under which, for the first time, teachers entered the school system on personal contracts rather than the collective wage agreement – a change Avrum Tomer set out in a policy paper and Kohelet continued to document and analyze for years after implementation stalled. The aim is flexibility in hiring and the ability to attract qualified professionals in subjects facing shortages; ahead of 5787 the Ministry has opened large-scale recruitment on personal contracts on better terms, with earlier restrictions removed.Other achievements in the education field include:
>> Research by Adv. Tzvia Shiff and Avrum Tomer examined a 2022 ministry order under which students could receive psychological counselling without their parents’ knowledge; the ministry has since revised it, and the updated director-general’s circular requires parental consent before a school refers a student for treatment.
>> Recommendations from our Simple Economics project entered the mandatory curriculum for grades 9–10, giving every student a grounding in economic reasoning.
>> MK (and former Kohelet researcher) Dan Illouz introduced a bill, informed by Kohelet’s research on the subject, that would end the special status enjoyed by Ottoman associations – a legal form inherited from Ottoman rule that escapes the disclosure rules binding ordinary nonprofits and includes the teachers’ unions – and subject them to the usual transparency duties. The bill has not yet come to a vote.
Rebuilding the Legal Architecture
The year’s most consequential legislative development was the Attorney General (Legal Opinions, Representation and Oversight) Law, advanced by Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Constitution Committee chairman MK Simcha Rothman, and passed in July by 65 to 51. Until now the attorney general’s opinions bound the government and she alone could represent the state in court, a combination found in no other democracy. The law ends both: the government may act against her opinion and may retain its own counsel to argue its position. Much of this follows the argument Dr. Aviad Bakshi proposed in his 2016 policy paper. The law takes effect in January 2027 and faces petitions to the High Court; separating the advisory and prosecutorial roles is left to the next Knesset.
The Nukhba terrorists jurisdiction bill submitted by MKs Yulia Malinovsky and Simcha Rothman, which establishes how the perpetrators who carried out the October 7 massacre can be brought to trial, passed by a majority of 93-0. Kohelet supplied much of the professional groundwork: research on how such prosecutions could be mounted, analysis of the available alternatives, and the first professional conference held on the subject, led by Dr. Aviad Bakshi, Adv. Avraham Shalev, Dr. Shuki Blass, and Sara Haetzni-Cohen.
Dr. Eyal Tsur supplied the Knesset Education Committee with analysis during its work on the law commemorating the October 7 massacre, chiefly on the corporate design of the new memorial authority it establishes.
A New Front in International Law
The Forum built out its international law capacity this year, with international jurist Adv. Sarah Scialom joining Prof. Eugene Kontorovich and Adv. Avraham Shalev. The department published a policy paper on the danger Qatar poses, legal analysis establishing the October 7 attack as genocide under international law, a legal opinion arguing that Gaza residents are being denied the right to emigrate, and several papers refuting rulings of the International Criminal Court. It also launched the Israel Legal Dispatch, a blog offering rapid response on live questions that has already found a wide professional readership.
Weighing Two Costly Proposals
Two expensive initiatives were examined and found wanting. An analysis by Dr. Michael Sarel and Yonatan Sorotzkin addressed a bill that would have sold public housing units to sitting tenants at discounts of 90 percent and more. Transferring public assets into private hands is generally welcome, but not at a tenth of their value to recipients who would not qualify for the assistance today, and with replacement stock to buy or build, the sale would have been a budgetary transfer rather than a privatization, as an earlier position paper by Dr. Asher Meir and Sorotzkin had shown. The bill did not advance.
A detailed opinion by Dr. Sarel against retroactively subsidizing mortgages taken before 2022 – on grounds of cost, the sanctity of private contracts, and the moral hazard it would create – informed the case against the measure, which has since stalled.
Building for What Comes Next
With elections approaching, Dr. Michael Sarel and Dr. Lev Drucker produced “A Platform for Growth: The 25 Most Important Reforms”, a practical agenda distilled from the work of the Forum’s departments, whose influence is already visible in party platforms and politicians’ interviews.
Other work is aimed squarely at the next Knesset:
>> The economics department’s work on the unequal distribution of the economic burden – including “Complete Fiscal Accounts: Households’ Net Transfers in Israel” by Ariel Karlinsky, Tom Sadeh, Eran Yogev, and Michael Sarel – has become the reference point in that debate.
>> Dr. Netanel Fisher’s work reframed the emigration debate by showing that departures among native-born Israelis are far smaller than commonly claimed, with much of the outflow consists of recent immigrants who never settled here.
>> The Forum joined a broad, ideologically diverse coalition working to advance public discussion of electoral reform, and of a semi-open ballot in particular, which would let voters influence the makeup of party lists and tie members of Knesset more directly to the public that elects them. The proposal rests on a paper by former Kohelet Fellows Prof. Avraham Diskin and Dr. Emmanuel Navon. (We take the occasion to wish our colleague Dr. Navon well in his new post as Israel’s ambassador to Japan.)
>> The regulation department closed the year by launching a dashboard that tracks changes in import regulation in real time, measures their effect on competition, prices, and import volumes, and identifies the barriers that survive them.
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These are the year’s largest results. Dozens of smaller ones – regulations rewritten, proposals quietly dropped, analyses supplied to committees and ministries that asked for them – are not listed here.
5787 opens with an election in view and much of this agenda still unfinished. We are grateful to those who make the work possible, and we wish you and your families a good and sweet new year.
