No, The Israeli Right Does Not Have A Permanent Majority
October 18, 2012 § 5 Comments
Dan Ephron, who is Newsweek’s Jerusalem bureau chief, wrote a piece on Monday about the Israeli right wing’s dominance of that country’s politics. Ephron quoted Noam Sheizaf as predicting that the election in January will create a “total collapse of the center-left, both as a political power and as an ideologically coherent idea,” and Ephron appears to agree that this is a likely scenario. The reason Ephron provides is that the fastest growing groups in Israel are the Orthodox and the ultra-Orthodox, and that “both groups lean heavily to the right.” Furthermore, “Since the core motivation for their political hawkishness is largely unchanging—a biblical injunction to maintain Israeli control over Judea and Samaria (their term for the West Bank)—it’s hard to imagine them ever shifting alliances. The upshot: with each passing year, the Israeli right grows stronger.”
This seems plausible on its face, but there are a few major problems with this analysis. First, conflating the Orthodox and the ultra-Orthodox (or Haredim) is a rookie mistake. Orthodox voters and Haredi voters have different motivations and vote based on different issues. The idea that a party like Shas speaks for, say, Israelis attending hesder yeshivot (where draft-eligible Israeli men split their time between army service and Torah study) is nonsense. It is also analytically lazy to contend that Orthodox Jews who serve in the IDF and go on to careers of various sorts are no different than Haredi Jews who do not perform army service and are largely dependent on state subsidies. Lumping their positions and ideologies together makes Ephron’s argument automatically suspect.
Second, it is simply not accurate to describe Haredi rightwing tendencies as being motivated by a desire to hold on to Greater Israel. As my friend Brent Sasley has pointed out, Haredim are generally anti-Zionist or non-Zionist. Not only do they not care about maintaining all of Greater Israel, as Ephron contends, but many Haredim are actually opposed to the idea of Israel at all, let alone an Israel that encompasses the West Bank. Haredi parties in the Knesset recognize the existence of the state, but they do not care about any biblical injunction regarding the land of Israel. In fact, as Brent usefully noted, Rav Ovadia Yosef, the founder and current spiritual leader of Shas (which is the Knesset’s largest Orthodox party of any stripe), held for years that it was acceptable to give up land if it would save Jewish lives, which is certainly not in line with Ephron’s dubious claim that Haredi rightwing positions stem first and foremost from a desire to hang on to the West Bank. Haredi parties generally – although historically not always – band together with other rightwing parties because they are very socially conservative and they feel most at home on the right. Issues surrounding the West Bank or the Palestinians have very little to do with it.
Third, throwing Likud’s politics in together with Haredi politics and pretending that it all stems from the same rightwing ideology is inaccurate. Both segments are conservative and ideological in their own way, but their conservatism and ideology are not shared. Likud is economically conservative and extremely devoted to the settler cause, and if any party has an ideology based on settling the entire land of Greater Israel, Likud is it. There is, of course, the inconvenient fact that Likud leaders are not themselves religious, including Likud founder Menachem Begin and current Likud prime minister Bibi Netanyahu, but certainly a sizable percentage of Likud voters are Orthodox (but not Haredi). Haredi parties are ideological and conservative as well, but their conservatism is social rather than economic – not surprising given how many Haredim survive on state largesse – and their ideology is one of fealty to Torah and Jewish law as a way of structuring daily life, rather than anything surrounding settling or holding onto the land. Likud is rightwing, and Shas and UTJ are rightwing, but they are rightwingers in the same way the Club for Growth and the Christian Coalition are rightwing – they inhabit the same general political universe but for vastly different reasons.
It is true that the Orthodox and the ultra-Orthodox both lean heavily to the right, but that is about the only part of Ephron’s analysis that isn’t stunningly ill-informed. Just because both groups have the word “Orthodox” in their names does not mean that they share the same core motivations. The Israeli right may be growing stronger, but that doesn’t mean that Haredi parties wouldn’t shift their allegiance to the left if they were promised a better deal on subsidies and control of Israel’s religious institutions. Ephron’s permanent majority theory is based on some serious basic factual errors, and given that he is the Jerusalem bureau chief for one of America’s most prominent newsweeklies, I expect some more rigor from him.
This Is Why Rabbis Should Stick To Torah Rather Than Politics
May 15, 2012 § 1 Comment
A committee is being established to come up with an alternative to the Tal Law, and the deal that emerges will affect Israel’s Haredi community more than any other segment of society since it will determine what becomes of the system whereby Haredi Jews are granted exemptions from military service. So naturally, one would expect the Haredi parties to be intimately involved in coming up with new proposals and fighting tooth and nail to get as many seats on the committee as possible. Right?
In fact, the Tal Law committee is being boycotted by Shas and UTJ following rabbinical instructions to the parties’ MKs that they should not participate since the Haredi rabbinical leadership is ideologically opposed to compulsory military service for the members of its community. Shas head Eli Yishai, who was previously on record as being willing to consider alternatives to the Tal Law, changed his mind after meeting with Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and now says that he is against any negotiations or quotas and that the right of Haredim to study Torah should not be subject to debate. Instead, Shas is going to come up with its own plan for draft reform outside the auspices of the official committee, while UTJ has threatened to leave the coalition on the orders of its own rabbinical leadership should Haredi students be prevented from studying Torah all day.
Boycotts of politics never end well. All that happens is that politics proceeds apace, and the parties that choose not to participate do not get to air their grievances, promote their interests, or affect the results in any way. This is particularly true when the boycotters are not protesting the legitimacy of the political system itself, but rather a specific policy that they do not like. Shas and UTJ are not taking a stand against the Knesset’s legitimacy; they just think that the people they represent should be allowed a different set of rules than everyone else. Now, it is understandable that they think this way, since for decades they have indeed had a different set of rules that were endorsed by the Knesset, the courts, and the other organs of Israeli democracy. The corollary to this though is that if the old rules were deemed to be legitimate, then any new rules that emerge must be deemed legitimate as well.
It seems to me that the Haredi politicians understand this. Yishai seemed willing at first to be involved in crafting a compromise, and apostate Shas MK Haim Amsalem has blasted Shas for not participating in the committee. It is only on the orders of the various rabbis who comprise Shas and UTJ’s “spiritual leadership” that the two parties are now boycotting the committee rather than serving on it. This appears like a logical step to the rabbinic overseers, since like anything else that conflicts with their interpretation of halakha – immodestly dressed women, “secular” music, the internet, etc. – their approach is to ban any contact with it. In their view, the Tal Law committee is going to force Haredim to stop devoting all their time to learning Torah, and since they consider this to be unlawful from a religious standpoint, they will have nothing to do with it and have instructed their MKs accordingly. While the religious logic of this might make sense, the political logic does not. What is sure to happen now is that a compromise will be worked out that will not be to the Haredi parties’ liking, the Haredi community and its leaders will reject it as illegitimate, and Israel will have a new problem on its hands. I do not begrudge the Haredi parties their reliance on rabbis to influence their policy proposals. In a democracy, any party has the right to organize itself as it chooses, and this applies to religious parties just as equally as it applies to anyone else. The Shas and UTJ MKs, however, know enough to realize that religious expertise is not the same as political expertise, and when the rabbinical leadership begins to control tactical political decisions rather than broad policy preferences, it is going to lead to political disaster.
