Why Benny Gantz Chose This Moment to Reach Out to the Arab Parties

On Sunday, Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin asked the Blue and White party’s Benny Gantz to try to form a governing coalition. A few days beforehand, Gantz had announced his interest in forming a unity government together with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, on the condition that it also include the bloc of Arab parties known as the Joint List. Haviv Rettig Gur explains the logic behind this gambit:

[Gantz] appears to have calculated that for the first time in their history, Israel’s Arab political factions, fresh from an unprecedented fifteen-seat win at the ballot box, had finally come to play ball in the hard-nosed game of Israeli coalition politics. No more mere complaints from the sidelines, posturing over symbols, or campaigns consumed by shows of defiance of the Jewish majority. The Joint List chairman, Ayman Odeh, yearns to make himself and his community a force to be reckoned with in the halls of the Knesset—and the deadlock among the Jews has given him the opportunity to do just that.

One signal of a political faction’s seriousness can be found in its sober willingness to prioritize its many goals and to sacrifice less-important ones for those that matter more. That may sound obvious, but a party like Balad, one of the four factions that make up the Joint List, had proved over the years that it could not look past its obeisance to radical Palestinian nationalism. Its members have joined the 2010 Turkish flotilla to Gaza, praised a murderer of Israeli children, and even spied for the Lebanese terror group Hizballah.

But [if Gantz] becomes prime minister, he remains dependent on those Arab votes, including from political factions that despise everything he stands for, to appoint ministers and approve budgets. . . . Odeh, of the formerly communist Ḥadash faction, could conceivably support Gantz’s government for the duration of a term—and hold him politically dependent the entire time. Balad, [by contrast], is a far less reliable partner. . . . A Balad-backed Gantz is a Gantz who by definition must quickly find new partners.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Benny Gantz, Israeli Arabs, 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