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