Benjamin Netanyahu Has a Moderating Influence on His Coalition Partners—Not Vice-Versa

Last week, Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he was tabling legislation proposed by the Sephardi and ḥaredi Shas party to criminalize mixed-sex worship at the Western Wall. Shortly thereafter, Shas leaders announced that they had no intention of pursuing the issue further. The episode, Jonathan Tobin writes, exemplifies the gap between the platforms of the more radical members of the current governing coalition and political realities:

The secular majority in Israel may rarely visit the Wall and don’t care much about the principle of religious pluralism, as opposed to the widely shared aversion to the way the official rabbinate controls life-cycle events like marriage. It also generally regards Orthodoxy as normative and non-Orthodox Judaism as a superfluous creation of the Diaspora.

Yet the heavy-handed effort of Shas . . . to impose the will of the religious community on society went over like a lead balloon. Netanyahu was speaking for the Likud party as well as the opinions of most Israelis when he made it clear that he was not going to let the proposal take the first step towards being enacted. That he did so in spite of the fact that the idea was part of the coalition agreement he signed with his allies after they won a clear majority in the November 1 election was telling.

Netanyahu’s easy success in reining in his allies also gives the lie to the notion that he is their hostage and must do as they bid him. To the contrary, it is they who are dependent upon him and the Likud for preserving their influence. . . . So rather than expose the extremism of the Netanyahu government and prove that it really is a threat to democracy and human rights, this foolish episode demonstrates the opposite.

Read more at JNS

More about: Aryeh Deri, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli politics, Shas, Western Wall

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