I am a political junkie.\u00a0 My drug is not domestic, as I prefer to feed my addiction with Israeli politics.\u00a0 This current round of elections has provided me with a particularly potent dose and it\u2019s one that\u2019s never been concocted before.\u00a0 Simply put, what\u2019s happening now is unprecedented.<\/p>\n
Israeli coalition politics has always been a particularly rarefied specimen of the art of compromise.\u00a0 No party ever accumulates sufficient seats to form a government.\u00a0 This always makes the search for bedfellows as interesting as the elections themselves.\u00a0 It also explains the general weirdness that often ensues once they\u2019ve all piled into bed together.<\/p>\n
Netanyahu\u2019s last government was unusually stable. This stability came at the cost of anointing no fewer than thirty-nine ministers and deputy ministers who all got fancy offices, cars, staffs and other goodies.\u00a0 Though Bibi didn\u2019t really need them, even the Labor Party joined last time, at least until most of them became fed up, leaving Defense Minister Ehud Barak behind and taking the Labor Party name with them.<\/p>\n
This time around, the Labor Party is not going to join Netanyahu\u2019s government.\u00a0 And it\u2019s not for lack of Bibi\u2019s trying.<\/p>\n
If he could only get the completely ideologically incompatible Laborites to sign on, then he could have the government that he really wants with his self-styled \u201cnatural partners,\u201d the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Shas and United Torah Judaism parties.\u00a0 But, alas, the Laborites are not interested in bringing their party to that kind of party.\u00a0 Especially not when a budget crisis \u2013 the very one that set the election in motion \u2013 guarantees painful cuts and angry voters.<\/p>\n
Under what passes for normal Israeli political circumstances, Bibi shouldn\u2019t really need Labor this go-around.\u00a0 As you\u2019ll understand shortly, these are not normal Israeli political circumstances.\u00a0 Likud performed quite poorly in the polls, landing only thirty-one seats.\u00a0 Actually, they did worse than that.\u00a0 This Knesset only swore in twenty genuine Likudniks.\u00a0 This is due to their bizarre election-eve decision to merge their list with Avigdor Lieberman\u2019s Yisrael Beiteinu which seated the other eleven.<\/p>\n
Yet Likud-Beiteinu, as the newly merged list styled itself, seemed in good shape nonetheless.\u00a0 It should have been easy to form a right-wing-plus-Haredim government.\u00a0 The Haredim have eighteen seats.\u00a0 Likud\u2019s ideological fraternal twin, the newly re-launched National Religious Party, d\/b\/a the Jewish Home, won twelve seats.\u00a0 Even better, just days before the election, they posted billboards picturing their charismatic new leader, Naftali Bennett, alongside Bibi as a pledge to back the once and future P.M.<\/p>\n
So what went wrong for Bibi?\u00a0 Why can\u2019t he put together a government with the Haredim and the right-wing Zionist Orthodox Jewish Home?\u00a0 It has all the ingredients that were ever necessary in the past to cook up a nutritious Netanyahu stew, and in the right proportion.<\/p>\n
As the saying goes, all politics is personal and Bibi, it would seem, has a personal problem with Bennett who once served as Bibi\u2019s chief of staff.\u00a0 It ended badly.\u00a0 So Bibi, acting like a baby, decided that he would rather not deal with Bennett.\u00a0 As coalition talks got underway, Likud ignored the Jewish Home despite their almost identical political agendas.\u00a0 Instead, he set his sites on the new darling of Israeli politics, Yair Lapid\u2019s Yesh Atid (\u201cThere\u2019s a Future\u201d) Party and its nineteen seats.<\/p>\n
Lapid, a well-known television journalist and personality, is indeed something very new in Israeli politics.\u00a0 His party features moderate Orthodox rabbis, radically secular journalists, university professors and activists from every corner of Israeli society. Not a one of them has ever sat in the Knesset before.<\/p>\n
He was the real big winner in the election.\u00a0 He built victory with a promise of radical changes to Israel\u2019s politics as usual.\u00a0 He tapped into middle class resentments about the cost of living, unaffordable housing and bloated ministries.\u00a0 And he zeroed in on the most acrimonious issue of all:\u00a0 the Haredi refusal to serve in the military.<\/p>\n
There is nothing \u2013 but nothing \u2013 that rankles the average Israeli more than the Haredi refusal to serve in the military or national service.\u00a0 It\u2019s not only about the fact that other parents are sending their children into harm\u2019s way while Haredi men sit in yeshivas all day long.\u00a0 It\u2019s also that the Haredim are paid to sit there.\u00a0 And the yeshivas are paid to have them there.\u00a0 And because the vast majority of Haredi men don\u2019t work, the government gives them endless handouts for their enormous families.<\/p>\n
How did they rate all of this taxpayer largesse?\u00a0 Well it helps that for decades they\u2019ve been the lynchpin of almost every government \u2013 right, left or center.<\/p>\n
Not this time.<\/p>\n
Lapid, in an astonishing expression of integrity, has refused to sit with them.\u00a0 Not, as he has painstakingly explained, because he hates the Haredim (though they all think so).\u00a0 But because he knows that with them, his promised reforms will hit a big black-suited wall.<\/p>\n
If Bibi thought he could do an end-run around Bennett by bringing in Lapid to sit with Likud and the Haredim, he was quickly disabused of that notion.<\/p>\n
Bibi\u2019s next move was to go after Labor.\u00a0 As I pointed out above, it\u2019s not going to happen.\u00a0 Then, unexpectedly, he brought in Tzipi Livni (who swore on a stack of whatever she swore on that she would NEVER join up with Bibi).\u00a0 In exchange for her six seats, he even gave her responsibility for negotiations with the Palestinians.\u00a0 This did not endear him to the right-wing Jewish Home who resent her previous offers to Abu Mazen and company.<\/p>\n
While Bibi was busy courting Labor and Livni, Bennett and Lapid were getting busy too.\u00a0 The two of them were falling in love.\u00a0 Politically.<\/p>\n
No one saw it coming.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know how many dates they had or if they kissed or fooled around right away, but Bennett and Lapid have become inseparable.\u00a0 The right-wing Jewish Home and the centrist Yesh Atid made an unbreakable pledge:\u00a0 they would enter the coalition as a couple or not at all.\u00a0 In other words, if Bibi wants either one of them \u2013 and he needs at least one \u2013 he can forget about the Haredim.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s tried to break them up, applying all kinds of pressure on the Jewish Home to join solo.\u00a0 He made an offer through the media (!) of all kinds of goodies for them.\u00a0 He enlisted the Haredim to put pressure on them.\u00a0 Haredi rabbis invited Zionist rabbis to their yeshivas and talked to them as if they believed that they are their equals.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t buy it.\u00a0 Only weeks earlier during the election, Rav Ovadia Yosef, Shas\u2019 \u201cspiritual\u201d leader, had called them the \u201cGoyish Home\u201d party so their sincerity was suspect.\u00a0 Then the Haredim became petulant, threatening to actively work to freeze and dismantle settlements that they had previously supported.\u00a0 Finally, they screamed and jumped up and down and held their breath and cried, \u201cDiscrimination!\u201d<\/p>\n
Nothing worked.\u00a0 The two are committed.<\/p>\n
There are many reasons, but one of them certainly is that Bennett and the Jewish Home don\u2019t want to sit with the Haredim any more than Lapid does.\u00a0 Even though Lapid\u2019s father was Israel\u2019s premier atheist and even though Lapid has his own religious needs met at a Reform synagogue, Bennett\u2019s folks still like him better than the Haredim.<\/p>\n
Why?<\/p>\n
Could it be because during their run in government the Haredim created thousands of jobs for non-Zionist Haredi rabbis, displacing modern Orthodox (i.e., Zionist) rabbis in the presumably Zionist government rabbinate?\u00a0 Could it be because Haredi rabbis have spent decades running down the legitimacy of Zionist rabbis\u2019 conversions?\u00a0 Or is it because while Haredim evade service, the Zionist Orthodox Jews have managed to take up arms for the state and then get jobs while still managing to study Torah?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all of those things and more.<\/p>\n
Last night, with no choices left to him and a two-week deadline looming, Bibi finally saw the writing on the wall.\u00a0 He cannot have a government without either the Jewish Home or Yesh Atid.\u00a0 Neither will join without the other and neither will sit with the Haredim.<\/p>\n
Personally, I hope that once they do go in, they will make the kinds of reforms that Lapid wants.\u00a0 Ultimately, I can foresee a scenario where Lapid\u2019s and Bennett\u2019s ideological differences will outweigh their commonalities.\u00a0 There has already been some internal Yesh Atid friction caused by Lapid\u2019s request of his Knesset members to withdraw from a tour of some particularly troublesome areas of the West Bank.\u00a0 Yet there is much that they can accomplish together before that day arrives.<\/p>\n
No matter what happens, it\u2019s so nice to see that the darkest, most parasitical and religiously coercive elements of Israeli society \u2013 and the Jewish world \u2013 will be forced to sit on the sidelines for a while.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am a political junkie.\u00a0 My drug is not domestic, as I prefer to feed my addiction with Israeli politics.\u00a0 This current round of elections has provided me with a particularly potent dose and it\u2019s one that\u2019s never been concocted before.\u00a0 Simply put, what\u2019s happening now is unprecedented. Israeli coalition politics has always been a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2281,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[13,20,31],"class_list":["post-2244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogentries","tag-haredim","tag-israel","tag-orthodox-judaism"],"yoast_head":"\n