Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended on Wednesday Israel's 2009-2010 budget as being "balanced," shortly after opposition leader Tzipi Livni said he had bowed to pressure to pass it.
"The budget deals with two challenges: A global economic crisis, unprecedented in scale, and an accumulation of security challenges [of a number] the state has not known for many years," said Netanyahu during a Wednesday evening meeting in Jerusalem.
"These two challenges are competing for the same resources and, therefore, we need to combine polices of unity and balance."
