The new Netanyahu government reflects the confluence of two revolutions, one religious the other social, that is embodied by the unexpected rise to power of two political novices, Yair Lapid and Nafali Bennet. Both campaigned on a program that called for relief of a middle class suffering from a lack of affordable housing, stagnant wages, and an increasingly mediocre public educational system at all levels including the universities. Both also campaigned for the termination of special privileges for the ultra-Orthodox Haredim. For years the Haredim were Bibi Netanyahu’s cynical political partners, denying the legitimacy of the State, while obtaining both exemptions for military and national service and subsidies for tens of thousands of yeshiva students who remained outside the workforce, as well as sub-ministerial offices, in exchange for unflinching support for the Prime Minister’s policies. Netanyahu expected both Lapid and Bennet to win only a few seats in the new Knesset. He anticipated forming a new coalition government that looked very much like the one he had led before the elections. He was wrong.
The Dynamic Duo Take on the Haredim
Dov S. Zakheim
Lapid’s Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party, created in the mold of the highly secular centrist party that his father Tommy once led, surprised Netanyahu by winning nineteen seats, making it the second largest bloc in the new parliament, behind Netanyahu’s Likud. Tommy Lapid had stood for a secularism that defied the religious authorities; his son was perhaps less provocative but equally determined to roll back Haredi gains over the past two decades. Bennet’s Habayit Hayehudi (The Jewish Home) party, a revived version of the moribund National Religious Party, finished the election with a strong showing that resulted in twelve seats in new Knesset. He too argued that the ultra-Orthodox bear their fair share of the national burden by serving in the military. And then the two men surprised Netanyanu again. Lapid, the television personality, and Bennett, the modern Orthodox army veteran and former Netanyahu aide who had made a fortune in hi-tech, pledged to stand together during the negotiations for the creation of a new coalition government.
Netanyahu, sensing the threat not only to the Haredim but to his own power, sought to sunder the Bennet-Lapid alliance, attempting to wean one or the other of them into a new government. He especially tried to win Lapid over, in no small part because Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister’s formidable spouse, abhorred Bennet.
Bibi got nowhere. Lapid refused to serve in a government that included the Haredi parties. At the same time, Bennet bitterly resented Netanyahu’s attacks on his character during the election campaign. In addition, the Haredim, fearful of being excluded from the new government, and thereby risking the likely loss of their privileged status in Israeli society, launched a vicious smear campaign against both Lapid and Bennet, but especially against Bennet, the Orthodox Jew. One video produced by the Haredim depicted scenes of Nazi brutality during the Holocaust, immediately followed by scenes of both party leaders giving their maiden speeches to the Knesset. As if that were not enough of a smear, the video compared Lapid and Bennet to Haman, the villain of the Book of Esther, juxtaposing passages that outlined his plan to “wipe out, kill and exterminate all the Jews from the young to the aged,” with proposals for Haredi military service.
The Haredi attacks served only to cement the Lapid-Bennet alliance. Netanyahu found that he would not be able to form a government unless he accommodated both men. After weeks of negotiations, the prime minister gave in.
As might be expected, the Haredim are both furious and fearful.
They are angry that someone who is a practicing Orthodox Jew could support a policies that undermine the hallowed principle that “the study of Torah is equal to all.” More importantly, they covet the funds that their political power has enabled them to obtain for their yeshivas and social programs over the past two decades.
And they are overwhelmed by fear. They fear a halt to the phenomenal growth in the population of full-time yeshiva students, from some 600 at the time of the founding of the State of Israel to about one hundred times as many today. Recalling bitter memories, some real, some exaggerated, of attempts by Zionist leaders in the early 1950s to secularize traditional Yemeni and Persian Jews, especially children, they dread exposure to what they feel is the depraved, immoral, irreligious society that surrounds them. In particular, they fear military service, with its “melting pot” impact on all who join it.
The Haredim dismiss the fact that thousands of religious men both study in yeshivas and serve in the military. They scorn the recent creation of special Haredi military units that cater to their particular needs, such as segregation from the opposite sex. They cannot tolerate the notion that their young women would have to do national service, such as work in hospitals, because, they allege, it will lead to intermarriage with men who are not ultra-Orthodox. And all for a State that was founded by “kofrim,” blasphemers, and, they assert, has not changed its nature in six decades.
Needless to say, those who are not Haredim are hoping that at last there will be an equitable distribution of the burdens of citizenship among the entire Israeli population. From their perspective, the Haredim have got away with too much for too long. The Haredi claim that students who “sacrifice their souls” by studying Torah are equivalent to those who sacrifice their lives on the battlefield ring hollow to the parents and families of the dead and wounded. The Haredi sense of entitlement to subsidies irritates those who cannot afford housing, or benefit from a first-rate education, for which Israel was renowned in past years. And Haredi pressure on other Israelis to conform to the demands of the ultra-Orthodox lifestyle, particularly by acts such as harassing women who sit in front of buses or who do not dress with sufficient “modesty,” outrage the overwhelming majority of Israelis of all stripes, ranging from the secular to the Orthodox, who subscribe to a philosophy of live-and-let-live.
The secular, Reform, traditional, and modern Orthodox remain skeptical that the Haredi tide will be rolled back. Those who voted for Lapid and Bennet have little trust in Bibi Netanyahu, but recognize that he is a master political wheeler-dealer. They are adopting a wait-and-see attitude regarding an actual change in Haredi status. After all, the Knesset has already approved a law that would require young Haredim to perform military or other national military service that has yet to be implemented.
With Lapid slated to be finance minister, and one of his party colleagues chairing the Knesset finance committee, it would appear, however, that the budgetary resources that sustained the Haredi lifestyle will finally be brought under control. The budget is policy, and for the first time in decades, policy appears to militate against the Haredim.
How will the Haredim react? For years their leaders have threatened that should the government implement military conscription for yeshiva students, they would urge the students and their families to leave Israel. If that were to come to pass, many, if not most Israelis would say “good riddance.”
But the Haredim have pursued another tactic to get their way: violence. For years they have burned tires, destroyed property, and hurled rocks at police and ordinary citizens in protest over the implementation of any program that they perceive would puncture the religious cocoon in which they live, for example, opening roads to traffic on Shabbat near their residential areas. If their rabbis issue a call to violence, or, more likely, merely hint that violence is acceptable in the “cause of Torah,” Israel may be in for a period of very troubling times.
Israel can ill afford new and more bitter internal stresses at a time when there is turmoil in its surrounding neighborhood. Instability in Syria, Egypt–particularly in the Sinai, and potentially elsewhere in the region, have compounded the threat that Iran poses to the Jewish state. Yet the mollycoddling of a significant and destabilizing element of Israeli society cannot go on indefinitely. The emergence of Lapid and Bennet as key leaders in the new Israeli government appears to herald a change that is long overdue. Now comes the hard part, making that change a reality.
Published on: March 15, 2013
Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He was Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) from 2001–04.