This Is Why Bringing Religion Into Politics Is A Bad Idea

Last week I wrote about Bibi Netanyahu’s attempt to use religious authority to create support for a strike on Iran. There are many problems with going down this path – and I should add that Netanyahu is not unique in this regard; there is a long history of Israeli and even American officials seeking Rav Ovadia Yosef’s approval for various national security initiatives – but one of the bigger ones is that once you allow politics to be influenced by religion, you can no longer control the deluge that is guaranteed to follow. To wit, Netanyahu has to deal with the fact that he is being publicly challenged by influential rabbinic authorities on implementing the High Court’s order to evacuate Migron, the settlement outpost that was built on land privately owned by Palestinians. Rabbi Elyakim Levanon, the chief rabbi of the Shomron Regional Council and a past ally of Netanyahu, declared over the weekend that if the prime minister attempts to “raise a hand on Migron [he] will have it cut off.” He also made implicit threats that the IDF will have to disband if the government offends the religious Zionist community since if yeshiva students stop joining the army on the orders of their rabbis, “there will be no army. Who will join the army? Those who raise two kids and a dog?” He took great pains to let everyone know that he wasn’t actually threatening the prime minister, but simply hoping that God makes his words come true.

This is not the first time that Rabbi Levanon has attempted to use religious pressure to change or influence government policy. This past January, he quit his position as head of the Elon Moreh hesder yeshiva (hesder yeshivot allow observant Israelis to combine army service and Torah study) because he vehemently disagreed with an IDF ruling that soldiers could not walk out of events in which there were women singing. Before quitting, he had given an interview in which he said that the IDF was ”bringing us close to a situation in which we will have to tell [male] soldiers, ‘You have to leave such events even if a firing squad is set up outside, which will fire on and kill you.’ I hope the army rabbinate will bring in some wise figures who will stop this terrible state of affairs. But if there are no such rabbis, we won’t have any choice, and I’ll recommend to anyone who asks me about the IDF that he shouldn’t enlist.” Given Levanon’s position as head of an influential hesder yeshiva and as chief rabbi of the Shomron Regional Council, which oversees 30 settlements in the West Bank, his thoughts on such matters cannot be simply brushed off, and his comments on Migron represent only the tip of the iceberg of what is to come from the religious settler community should the High Court decision be enforced.
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