It's About the Jewish Nation Bill

Why are we going to have new elections? The New York Times says:

Israel’s march toward early elections set out last week with a political row over a nationality bill. This week it morphed into a clash over proposed housing changes and the state budget.

But Israeli political analysts said the call for elections, 20 months after the current coalition was sworn in, was not about nationality or reduced-cost housing or any other issue of ideology or principle.

Instead, they said, Mr. Netanyahu had simply had enough of his fractious coalition partners and wanted a more manageable government made up of rightist allies and the ultra-Orthodox parties he has long considered his natural partners.

“It is not about this law or that,” said Yehuda Ben Meir, a former politician and a public opinion and national security expert at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. Noting that there was room for compromise on the nationality bill and that Mr. Netanyahu originally voted in favor of the housing bill, he said the prime minister appeared to have used these issues to force a coalition crisis.

There is no question that the current coalition is not exactly what a Prime Minister dreams of. But it is my opinion that yes, the Jewish Nation Bill was the straw that broke the camels back.

On one hand we should be sad that so much money will be wasted on new elections. On the other hand, the true face of Livni and Lapid, and not to mention politicians further to the left, has been revealed. The law, which more or less gives legal status to a few sentences from Israel's Declaration of Independence, was just too Jewish for these people! They don't want a Jewish State. They want a "State of all of its citizens."

They had agreed to this law in the coalition agreement. They proved to be people who do not keep their word. Let's hope that the Israeli electorate pays these politicians back in kind, and that the next coalition will be proud of being Jewish.

The New Israeli Draft Plan

INN has published details of the new draft plan as agreed upon by the three major partners in the new coaliton: Likud-Beiteinu, Yesh Atid, and HaBayit HaYehudi:

Sources in Bayit Yehudi said they had managed to alleviate some of the harsher strictures that Yesh Atid had sought in the agreement, and had even improved the standing of yeshivas in some ways. Among those accomplishments, party sources said, was the recognition by the state for the first time of the importance of Torah study.

The coalition agreement will read “the State of Israel recognizes the importance and centrality of Torah study as a central value of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.” Students who do receive exemptions will be receiving them as Torah students upholding these values, as opposed to receiving them for “academic excellence,” as Yesh Atid had sought to have them termed.

In addition, the draft of yeshiva students will begin at age 21, instead of age 18 – giving students an automatic deferment of three years. At that point, they will have to serve two years, like all other Israelis, as the coalition agreement calls for an eventual reduction of service for all Israelis to two years, instead of the current three years.

The reduction in service for all will be possible as a result of the extra manpower the army will have with the inclusion of hareidi yeshiva students. The army will significantly increase the number of Nachal Hareidi units to accommodate the new recruits. A wide-ranging plan for the drafting of women that Lapid had sought was also shelved, Bayit Yehudi said.

Yeshiva students who refuse to appear for military service will not be criminally charged, as had been planned. Instead they will be subject to economic sanctions, losing virtually all government support. Party officials said that this aspect of the agreement would avoid the “doomsday” scenarios hareidi political leaders portrayed of jack-booted military police marching into yeshiva study halls and pulling students away from their Talmud folios. No arrests will be made in yeshivas, the deal specifies.

The number of students who will be exempted for Torah study will be 1,800, far more than the 400 Lapid had suggested. The plan will take effect only in 2017, and students who are beyond enlistment age up until that time will not be “grandfathered” into the arrangement.

The article does not tell us if the plan has anything to say about the drafting of Arabs. Neither does it inform us of what will be the status of the various Hesder programs under this plan. Is the 1,800 exemptions per student-year, or is it the grand total? (I think that it is the grand total.) How will it be decided who gets these exemptions? Can you imagine what kind of Hareidi infighting this could cause?

If this plan goes into effect, what will the reaction of the ultra-Orthodox? Since the plan apparently does not talk about drafting Arabs, I imagine that the Hareidim will take their case to the High Court of Justice, saying that the plan is discriminatory. I do not expect the court to help them, because drafting Hareidim has been on the secular agenda for so long. They will resort to their regular legal newspeak to sanction the law.

It is obvious that many Hareidim will forgo government benefits in order to avoid army service and to continue the way of life that they are accustomed to. What's more, since this is being done against their will of the Hareidi rabbis, many of special programs that exist today that are geared towards the ultra-Orthodox, such as “Bina B'Yarok”, may be shunned.

I also suspect that there are those who will choose to live abroad. The land of Israel is acquired through affliction, and not everybody is ready to pay the price.

Our Unfortunate Situation

Yes, the situation is a mess. Relations between the National Religious public and the ultra-Orthodox are tense. The UOs are mad at the NRs for making a political pact with Yair Lapid. Although I understand that Naftali Bennett was really forced into this pact because of Netanyahu's desire to keep him and the Jewish Home party out of the government, I cannot say that I am happy about it. I wanted to see a different pact, and I warned what would happen if such a pact would not be formed:

The religious parties are now faced with a great task: to strive for unity! This unity must not be a unity of "lets grit our teeth and bear them". It must be a unity of mutual respect, founded on humbleness and the ability to see beyond one's own shteeble.

HaBayit HaYehudi went a long way on the road to unity before the elections, and it payed off in the polling booth. Now they, along with Shas and Yahadut HaTorah, must bury the hatchet, and find the way to sanctify God's name in the public sphere. The public will not forgive them if they fail.

Instead, we have this unfortunate situation. The man ultimately responsible is Prime Minister Netanyahu. He is the one who destroyed the natural Right/Religious/ultra-Orthodox block. In the previous elections he left the National Union out of the government, in spite of numerous promises to bring them in. In the current elections the Likud-Beiteinu campaign found nothing better to do than to besmirch the Jewish Home party. The Jewish Home party tried to form a block with Shas and UTJ. Since these efforts did not bear fruit, Bennett, like I wrote previously, had a choice between making a pact with Lapid or sitting in the opposition.

As far as the government that will be formed, they should know that any attempt to conscript Hareidim against their will is doomed to fail. Bennett will have to prove that he really is an "ach", a brother, to the ultra-Orthodox public who feels, justifiably or not, betrayed. The Jewish Home Party will have to stand like a fortified wall against the anti-Torah forces in the Yesh Atid party, as well as other anti-Torah MKs in the Knesset.

The Need to Strive for Unity

The elections are over and Binyamin Netanyahu is left with the formidable challenge of forming a stable coalition. This is a nerve wracking process, not only for the haggling politicians but also for the public who helplessly watch it unfold. In Israeli political discourse, the Russian variant of the word "coalition" is used: ko-a-litz-i-ah. Yitzchak Rabin used to call it go-a-litz-i-ah, a play on the Hebrew word for "disgusting". For once, I agree with Mr. Rabin.

As the stomach turns: Netanyahu could, in theory, ignore Yesh Atid's 19 mandates and form a narrow coalition of 61 MKs: 31 from Likud-Beiteinu, 12 from HaBayit HaYehudi, 11 from Shas and 7 from Yahadut HaTorah. However, such a coalition would likely be quite unstable, as it would only take 2 disgruntled MKs to take the government down. Therefore, Bibi is going to great lengths to please Ya'ir Lapid and his cohorts. Lapid better watch his step! For if Yesh Atid continues to grandstand, Bibi could very well leave them out of the coalition at the beginning. In such an event, wallowing in the opposition may very well cause the Yesh Atid party to disintegrate, with some of them forming a faction that will run on all fours in order to join the government.

With the expected change in the status quo regarding religion and state, one would expect that the religious parties would find a way to cooperate. Unfortunately, the distrust among them is very, very deep. In addition to this deep distrust is an equally deep enmity, fed by mutual disrespect. Everybody thinks that their way of life is the way of life, that their rabbis are the rabbis, and that anyone else just does not make the grade. The situation brings to mind the words of the Netziv, in his introduction to the book of Genesis:

Because of the groundless hatred in their hearts, they suspected anyone with a different religious practice of being a Sadducee or heretic. Due to this, they came to extreme bloodshed and to other evils until the Temple was destroyed. Regarding this came the justification of the divine judgment, because the Holy One, blessed be He, is a yashar, and He cannot tolerate righteous people like this unless they also function with decency in their dealings with the world.

The religious parties are now faced with a great task: to strive for unity! This unity must not be a unity of "lets grit our teeth and bear them". It must be a unity of mutual respect, founded on humbleness and the ability to see beyond one's own shteeble.

HaBayit HaYehudi went a long way on the road to unity before the elections, and it payed off in the polling booth. Now they, along with Shas and Yahadut HaTorah, must bury the hatchet, and find the way to sanctify God's name in the public sphere. The public will not forgive them if they fail.

Yair Lapid Interviewing Rabbi Yitzchak David Grossman

Secular Coercion Will Fail (part 5)

This is just hilarious:

A day before the Tal Law is set to expire, activists demanding a universal IDF draft arrived in Bnei Brak on Tuesday to give out flowers and leaflets urging the ultra-Orthodox sector to shoulder the burden of army service.

Response to the activists' efforts was unenthusiastic; some residents of the predominantly haredi central Israeli city tore the faux draft summons and threw the flowers away.

"Why did you come here?" one haredi youth asked the protesters. "To provoke us?"

When the protest turned tumultuous, the activists, who belong to the Suckers Camp movement, had to double back.

"Where did you serve?" a young ultra-Orthodox man, Moshe, asked Idan Miller, a leader of the protest movement. When the latter answered that he served at Army Radio, Moshe sneered at him.

"You're a sucker, believe me," Moshe said. "Even Yair Lapid contributed more than you. What did you contribute at your air-conditioned (office)? If you would have worked for a media channel, at least you would have made some money."

Did you get it? One of the leaders of the protest movement did his army service at Galei Tzahal, (also known by its acronym, Galatz), which is the radio station of the IDF. You may ask yourself, "How does Galei Tzahal contribute to Israel's security?" The answer is, it doesn't. Israeli Army Radio is an anachronistic organization that should have been closed down long ago:

Galatz started its transmissions on September 24, 1950 as a continuance of the Hagana transmission to the Jewish public during the Israeli War of Independence.

I am not surprised. Often the ones who scream about the loudest about Haredim not serving in the army are the ones whose own army service was insignificant or non-existent. Those who serve in the fighting units do it out of love for their people and country (and for some of them, their love of God).