Benny Gantz Should Be Praised for Compromising, Not Condemned for Capitulating

After three inconclusive elections in a year’s time, Israel’s political stalemate seemed to come to an end last week when the leaders of the two largest parties—Benny Gantz and Benjamin Netanyahu—agreed to form a governing coalition together with some of the smaller parties. According to the deal, Netanyahu will serve as prime minister for eighteen months, after which he will be succeeded by Gantz. This compromise, paradoxically, has led to the breakup of Gantz’s Blue and White party, as two of its three constituent factions have refused to join the unity government. Their leaders have denounced Gantz for supposedly crumbling before Netanyahu, but Jonathan Tobin argues that he has acted bravely:

At a moment of crisis for the state of Israel, while everyone else around him was thinking only about short-term political gains and grudges, Gantz chose to save the country from further turmoil—and a possible fourth election—at a time when it was staggered by the high cost of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic. The government he forms with Netanyahu will enable the country to pass a budget and begin the work of recovering from an unprecedented economic disaster.

Gantz . . . had it within his power to cripple Netanyahu’s hopes of forming another government by using the votes of the 61 Knesset members who wanted to oust the prime minister to pass a law that would prevent someone currently under indictment (like Netanyahu) from forming a government. That would have doomed Netanyahu, but it also would have plunged Israel into political chaos at a time when the country is under a near-total shutdown as its overburdened medical staff and emergency workers fight the spreading contagion and rising toll of victims.

Though Gantz had been tempted to try to form a government with the support of the Joint Arab List, the former soldier also understood that this was a moment to transcend political grudges. That wasn’t true of [his erstwhile allies] Yair Lapid and Moshe Ya’alon, who clearly regard their desire to get even with Netanyahu for past offenses as more important than serving the country during a national crisis. They and many on the left, who have been praying for a chance finally to beat Netanyahu, are enraged that Gantz snatched it away.

Read more at JNS

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Israeli politics, Moshe Yaalon, Yair Lapid

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