As Israelis Go to the Polls, There’s Little Reason to Expect a Conclusive Result

Today Israel holds its third election in twelve months’ time, after the two 2019 elections failed to deliver decisive results. Yet the various surveys of voter opinion taken in the past several weeks uniformly suggest that neither the Likud party (led by Benjamin Netanyahu) nor the centrist Blue and White party (led by the former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz) will win a decisive victory or have a clear path to forming a majority coalition in the Knesset. Haviv Rettig Gur explains:

[W]hile it’s true that some Knesset seats shifted around as some voters reconsidered their options [between the April and September 2019 elections], what is more surprising . . . was the loyalty exhibited by the vast majority of voters—and the unexpected staying power of Blue and White.

Barring a shift in turnout or an unexpected run on the polls at just the right polling stations, Netanyahu still is unlikely to be able to form a majority coalition with only right-wing and ḥaredi parties, and Avigdor Liberman [of the right-wing, secularist Yisrael Beytenu party] is less likely to join his coalition today than before. The two men have a long and mostly unpleasant shared history, and Liberman knows that his party’s recent political growth comes from voters who prefer Blue and White to a Likud government.

That reality has shaped Monday’s race. It is no longer about all-out victory. Assuming neither faction suddenly implodes, . . . the fight has shifted to defining the post-vote narrative. If victory no longer comes in a single ballot-box sweep, it must be sought in slow, grinding attrition of one’s opponents.

It should surprise no one, then, that both parties and both campaigns have already begun preparing for round four.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Avigdor Liberman, Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Israeli Election 2020, Israeli politics

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society