No, Israel Probably Won’t Hold Elections in November

On Wednesday, Israeli news media began reporting, based on an anonymous source within the prime minister’s office, that Benjamin Netanyahu is planning to call elections for this coming November—which, were it to actually happen, would be the fourth election in nineteen months. But even though polls show Netanyahu’s Likud party with a solid lead, writes Haviv Rettig Gur, the same polls show that it would likely be very difficult for him to form a governing coalition. It’s more probable that Netanyahu is simply bluffing, Gur argues:

How will Netanyahu fare in November, by the time election day rolls around, with the economy deeper in the slumps, global trade continuing to decline, hundreds of thousands more Israelis out of work, and a [coronavirus] death toll possibly reaching into the thousands? It’s an exceedingly bad time for Netanyahu to throw those dice.

But it’s still an excellent moment, from the prime minister’s perspective, to threaten elections. Netanyahu is in a bitter running fight with [his main coalition partner], Defense Minister Benny Gantz, over whether to pass a one-year budget law for 2020 or a two-year budget through the end of 2021. . . . Finance Ministry and Bank of Israel officials back a one-year budget law, arguing that the future is too uncertain in the middle of a pandemic to make a two-year budget anything but an exercise in frustration and delay.

But Gantz wants the two-year law promised him in the coalition agreement between Likud and [his own] Blue and White party. Israeli law stipulates that if a Knesset fails to pass a budget, it triggers an election. A two-year law would mean Gantz won’t have to find himself in the spring of 2021 scrambling to pass a new 2021 budget to avoid the automatic triggering of an election. . . . What better argument to convince Gantz to back that one-year budget, Netanyahu must be thinking, than the threat of even more imminent elections?

Yet, as Gur goes on to explain, the unusual tensions between Gantz and Netanyahu—rival leaders of the government—have given the Knesset both an impetus and an opportunity to reassert its authority over the executive branch. And that’s not a bad thing.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Coronavirus, 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