Israeli Daylight Saving Law

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Israeli Daylight Saving Law historically differed from the daylight saving rules of most other countries. For years, the law only established that the period of Daylight Saving Time (DST, also called "summer time") must last at least 150 days.

Until 2005, the start and end of DST each year was established in an ad hoc fashion as the result of haggling between political parties representing various sectors of Israeli society. Parties representing religious groups wanted the start delayed till after Passover and the end to precede Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, while the secular parties would argue for starting it earlier and ending it later. Thus, there was no established rule that could guarantee a predictable changeover in either direction.

All this changed in early 2005 when a law was passed establishing the onset of DST every year at 2:00 AM on the last Friday before April 2, i.e. on the Friday on or before April 1 (irrespective of when Passover falls) and ending at 2:00 AM on the Sunday between Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur (Note that weekends in Israel are Friday to Saturday). This effectively ended the annual debate.

In the past, the unpredictability of DST in Israel became frustrating enough that Microsoft Windows stopped trying to track them and just made Israeli time be Greenwich Mean Time plus two hours (GMT+2) (and disabled the daylight saving option). This has led to various ad hoc solutions to the problem in Windows systems and other Microsoft software (e.g. Outlook calendar entries are often off by an hour when shared, due to the lack of DST support).

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