Nitzan Horowitz urges Interior Minister Gideon Sa'ar to extend daylight saving, to "put an end to this strange injustice."
By LAHAV HARKOVnitzan horowitz 311(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
Daylight Saving Time, which begins this year on Thursday night, must be lengthened until November, MK Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz) said Wednesday.“Just extending DST until November 1 will decrease traffic accidents, save energy and most importantly give us all another hour of daylight,” Horowitz said.“This is the right thing to do, for the entire public in Israel.”Horowitz resubmitted his bill from the previous Knesset to extend DST by one month, which he says will bring Israel in line with Europe and the US.Now that Shas leader Eli Yishai and haredi parties are not in the coalition, the Meretz MK added, the legislation can be passed.“We can finish this process and finally put an end to this strange injustice,” Horowitz said, calling for Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar to review the matter and support his bill.A spokeswoman for Sa’ar said he plans to examine the DST law passed in the previous Knesset. However, a source close to Sa’ar pointed out that as he has only been interior minister for a week he had yet to study the issue thoroughly and decide on his stance.Last October, the Knesset passed a law determining that DST will end on October 1, each year, according to recommendations of a committee appointed by then-interior minister Yishai. Horowitz’s bill called for DST to end on November 1, and other legislation offered a compromise of October 10.Before the law was passed, the clocks were set back an hour on a date that varied from year to year and was often even earlier than before October, as it was changed before Yom Kippur.In the previous Knesset, DST became one of many issues at the crux of disputes between secular and haredi MKs on separation of religion and state. Perhaps foreshadowing the current coalition, in which the Bayit Yehudi aligned itself with Yesh Atid, leaving the ultra- Orthodox in the opposition, then-Bayit Yehudi leader Daniel Herschkowitz, a rabbi and professor of mathematics, said religion cannot be used as an excuse for keeping DST short.
