Tel-Chai Nation

David Suissa writes that the religious political parties in Israel - including the ultra-Orthodox - risk harming the religion they allegedly adhere to:

Israel’s religious parties crave political power because it enables them to fulfill their religious agenda, from refusing to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces to forcing Torah laws on the public. Over the years, because Netanyahu has desperately needed their seats to form a majority coalition, he has tolerated their demands.

He probably figured the same thing would happen this time around – but one man stopped him. Avigdor Lieberman, chairman of the right-wing secularist Yisrael Beytenu party, decided he had had enough and refused to compromise on a bill to draft haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews into the IDF.

Normally, Netanyahu is able to pull things together at the last minute, because Knesset members are loath to jeopardize their positions by going to new elections. In this case, it didn’t work. The religious parties threw a few bones of compromise, but Lieberman held firm, sticking to the original draft bill.

This dispute is rooted in the founding of the Jewish state, when Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion made the fateful decision to exempt ultra-Orthodox men (only a few hundred at the time) from enlisting in the IDF. A well-known Modern Orthodox rabbi in Israel once told me that decision did more to turn off secular Jews to religion than anything else.

This makes sense. If you’re an Israeli parent whose children are risking their lives to defend the state, why should ultra-Orthodox citizens be exempt? And if you see ultra-Orthodox leaders fighting to keep their community out of the army, how would that make you feel about religion in general?

There are countless other ways that political power in the hands of ultra-Orthodox parties has become corrosive.

“For too long, this country has been ruled by a haredi minority,” writes Jerusalem Post Editor-in-Chief Yaakov Katz. “This one group has controlled all matters of religion and state while holding the government hostage, either by preventing public transportation for millions of people who depend on it, or preventing the creation of a civil marriage option for the nearly 450,000 Israelis who might have served in the IDF and risked their lives for Israel, but cannot get married since their father is Jewish but not their mother.”

Religious intolerance is also a key contributor to the growing schism between Israel and Diaspora Jewry. The equitable compromise to allow egalitarian prayer at the Western Wall, painstakingly negotiated by Natan Sharansky a few years ago, was sabotaged by religious parties. The list goes on, from overly stringent conversion rules to the rejection and humiliation of non-Orthodox streams of Judaism.

How could this be good for the Jews or for Israel?

Of course it's not good for Israel and citizenry. And that's exactly why the Haredis - and even some of the people in the Union of Right-Wing parties - are going to have to be challenged about this sooner or later. Ben-Gurion himself was said to regret the decision he'd made. That too is food for thought.

Labels: haredi corruption, Israel, Judaism, Knesset, military, Moonbattery, political corruption