Applause in the Knesset - The Israeli Parliament On Hidden Norms 

Dr. Shirley Avrami

President Trump's speech in the Knesset on the day of the release of the hostages from Gaza, October 13th 2025, was accompanied by repeated applause and clapping. Those present applauded one hundred and forty times during the speech, following the words of Knesset Speaker MK (member of Knesset) Amir Ohana at the beginning of the session: "Ladies and gentlemen, before we begin, I would like to remind you that this debate is a special one, and therefore there will be no interruptions. Anyone who disrupts will be removed from the plenary hall and will not be allowed to return until the end of the meeting. There will be no warnings. In addition, it will be possible to applaud at this meeting." 

Granting permission to applaud at the same breath as the prohibition on reading interpellations symbolizes a process in which the plenary hall is transformed from an arena for parliamentary debate to an arena for performance. The permission given by the Knesset Speaker to applaud at the ceremonial meeting in honor of President Trump has become a repeated demonstration of them, after every name is mentioned and at the end of every paragraph, and not as it should be, if at all, a significant and extraordinary gesture. The applause has become the essence of the meeting, instead of what accompanies it.

The practice of not clapping in the plenary debates is perhaps a consequence of the Knesset being established, in many ways, in the spirit and according to the rules of the British Parliament, upon the end of the British mandate of Palestina in 1948. In Britain, as in other Commonwealth parliaments, clapping in parliament is considered a breach of the rules of practice and instead members of parliament call out "Hear, Hear" to express support, as a kind of interjection. According to the Erskine May, the British Parliament's Rules of Procedure, the House of Commons Modernization Committee noted in 1998 that while spontaneous applause at the end of a speech cannot be considered as a disruption, if the practice becomes permanent it could lead to a situation where the success or failure of a speech is judged not by its content, but by the length of the applause.

In the European Parliament and other European parliaments, applause is more acceptable, and in the American Congress, applause is indeed an indicator of the quality of the speech and the political strength of the speakers, with the media publishing their number and partisan distribution as indicators of support or disagreement.

A study found that the frequency of applause increased consistently with the development of television and its broadcasts from the House of Representatives, with the president who was perceived as the one during whose time the 'State of the Union' speech became a media event being President Ronald Reagan, himself an actor before entering politics; the study notes that applause, unlike interjections, is a collective, spontaneous, scheduled or pre-coordinated response, and therefore must be analyzed differently.

With the permission for live broadcasts of Knesset debates and even more so with the phone camera becoming almost part of the human body, many customs that originate from a different technological era have become irrelevant, and there is still room to examine what happens to the Knesset when it becomes, for example, an arena for selfies.

The incident in which then-Knesset member Oren Hazan ‘pushed himself’ close to President Trump to take a selfie with him during his previous visit to Israel in 2017 was seen at the time as a blatant violation of the rules of ceremony, but since then this practice has also trickled down to the plenary. 

The current Knesset’s tenure is punctuated by the contradiction of norms that have been practiced in the Knesset since its establishment, some of which are anchored in the Knesset’s regulations and some of which are the result of agreed-upon and accepted practice, even if unwritten. "Expressing respect by standing or clapping" is indeed permitted in the plenary, with the permission of the chairman of the session, according to Section 41G (1) of the Knesset Rules of Procedure in the chapter 'Conduct in the Knesset Plenary'. however, in previous Knesset terms it was customary that clapping was a rare event, which almost never happened, and chairpersons even used to prevent it from taking place in the plenum. Former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg remembers that the custom was that there was no clapping in the plenum, and sometimes the chairman had to mention this and reprimand those clapping. On July 22nd, 2009, reported Channel 7 that "the moment MK Muhammad Barake was removed from the hall was surprisingly accompanied by thunderous applause from the Knesset's guest gallery. The Speaker of the Knesset, MK Reuven Rivlin, was furious and ordered the protesters removed from the gallery." In contrast, former Knesset Speaker MK Mickey Levy notes that the Knesset Speaker occasionally approves applause in the plenary session depending on the occasion, and includes, among other things, applause for the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, and applause that is part of a standing ovation, for important guests. However, what was once a rare event has become a common and accepted practice in the current Knesset term, and applause is also heard when a coalition bill is passed, and at other events that are supposed to be routine in the life of the plenary. For example, on March 21st, 2023, the approval of the 'Law to Cancel the Disengagement Plan from Northern Samaria' was accompanied by applause, and on March 20th, 2025, it was announced that "Minister Ben Gvir returned to the government and declared allegiance, to applause."

The change of norms for applause is not the problem, but its symptom, and the problem is the change of norms of the Knesset. What happens in the Knesset has various implications - for its place among the three branches of government, the judiciary, the legislature and the executive, 0n its ability to fulfill its three functions, legislation, public debate and oversight of government work, and also on the public's trust in it. According to The Institute for Liberty and Responsibility, in November 2025, the level of public trust in the Knesset stood at 13%, the lowest figure among the institutions examined - the government, the Knesset, the Supreme Court and the President.

Section 41(d) in the chapter 'Conduct in the Knesset Plenary' of the regulations states that "a member of Knesset shall speak in the Knesset Plenary in an appropriate manner, in acceptable language and in a manner that preserves the dignity of the Knesset, and shall not commit an act in the Plenary that would harm the dignity of the Knesset, the dignity of one of its members, or the order of its deliberations."

Verbal violence, bullying, humiliation of public officials who appear on committees as part of their duties and abuse of them, cursing, shouting and rudeness, have become a spectacle that has broken into the Israeli parliament. Because, indeed, the parliament has been broken into. Even before the harm of rules of reasonable cultural behavior between people, something happened in the Knesset to the point of decibels. The debates are conducted with shouting and screaming, both as simple rude behavior, and also so that the voices of opponents are not heard.

Thus, Minister David Amsalem told Knesset Member Merav Ben Ari at the opening of the current Knesset session on October 20th, 2025, "Enough of the scolding," and in response she called him a "shawish," an expression that in popular parlance refers to a low-level servant.

"Nonsense," "garbage," "stinking Nazi," and "scum" are just some of the derogatory expressions heard in the current Knesset term, and when they are accompanied by threatening physical gestures, insults, repeated humiliations, and the inappropriate use of the power of committee chairpersons to remove Knesset members from debates, they turn the Knesset into a sad arena, where there were exceptions to the rules of reasonable debate in the past, but today there is almost no 'reasonable debate' taking place there anymore.