Fundamentalist Orthodox Judaism Is Dealing a Death Blow to Israel's Democracy - Opinion - Haaretz.com
The moral collapse of Israeli Orthodoxy is at the heart of Israel’s current crisis.
To be sure, there is a political dimension to the crisis as well, centering on the malignant tenure of Benjamin Netanyahu. The one-time patriot and fervent Zionist now facing criminal charges, has descended into narcissistic recklessness.
Terrified by the possibility of prison, Netanyahu is dead set on keeping his job, regardless of the prevarications and compromises demanded. Embracing demagoguery and fostering his own own cult of personality at unimagined levels he has shown himself willing to dismiss checks and balances, demand a judiciary pre-selected for its political sympathies, and move Israel towards electoral autocracy.
And it all came to a head Monday, with the Knesset voting for a key part of his government’s plan to overhaul the judiciary. The plan has prompted seven months and counting backlash of mass protests.
Netanyahu could never have hoped to succeed in overturning democracy – a moment Israel is now at the precipice of - without willing allies beyond his own Likud party.
Netanyahu, looking to form a government, quickly found his allies two very different kinds of religious parties. The two ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) parties and the party he helped midwife, precisely to help him win power, Religious Zionism.
Each had its own agenda: the Religious Zionists wanted to build settlements at a breakneck pace across the territories with the goal of annexation.
The Haredi parties wanted to fortify the status quo for their young men: exempting them from studying core curriculum subjects like math and English, from military service, and from participating in the work force.
Each supported the demands of the other as a matter of political survival. Both knew that without the other, they might not be in the government.
Ultra-Orthodox teenaged boys sit on a wall in Bnai Brak, near Tel Aviv in May.Credit: Tomer Appelbaum
Both had other agenda items too: separating men and women in public spaces;restricting the rights of Arabs, Reform Jews, and LGBTQ people; amending the Law of Return; increasing subsidies for yeshiva students, and on and on.
Most importantly both agreed on the absolute necessity of restricting the power of Israel’s Supreme Court. The court did not permit settlement building on Arab-owned land, and Religious Zionism did not want their plan for massive settlement expansion delayed by constant court challenges.
The Haredim, aware the court had overturned every law that allowed Haredi young men to evade the draft were seeking a permanent fix to this problem, and that meant neutering its powers.
And so, the extremist religious settlers, and ultra-Orthodox parties conveyed their terms. Settlement building and draft exemptions were their price for establishing a government and keeping it in power, with these demands to be implemented by the so-called “reform” of the Court—by which they meant not reform but destruction.
The destruction of the Supreme Court means a death blow to democracy as well.
The judicial reform package that followed became the focus of the Netanyahu agenda.Without it, after all, he would have no government. An added bonus, if Israel ended up with a more constrained, more conservative court, it might be more sympathetic to him if his own criminal case were ultimately to come before it.
But now the problem.
Members of the United Torah Judaism party, an ultra-Orthodox party confer at the Knesset in November.Credit: Ohad Zwigenberg
Netanyahu is dependent for his political survival on two radical religious blocs, both characterized by profound fundamentalism, religious intransigence, and a brazen anti-rationalism. Both profess to speak in the name of Jewish tradition, but have ripped the words of Torah from their proper context, shamelessly twisting and distorting them. Both delight in circling their ideological wagons, while remaining oblivious to everyday realities.
And this above all: Loud, belligerent, and relentless, they keep their militance sharply honed, and care not at all what the majority of Israel’s citizens think and want.
How then is Netanyahu to govern? As democracy-loving Israelis take to the streets, again and again, the answer, of course, is that he cannot.
Let us consider the dilemmas that his religious partners pose for him.
Haredi parties demand the passage of a basic law that would officially recognize full-time Torah study as an alternative to army service. And they insist there can be no compromise on this point.
But there is no basis in Torah for such a general exemption from military duty, and a law of this type would inflame the general public almost as much as the government’s current anti-democracy proposals.
It would be seen as outrageous norm-breaking at a vulnerable time, when Israel’s army and reserves are already stretched to the limit. And it would be viewed as an unceremonious trashing of Israel’s fundamental social contract, which calls for “a people’s army” and which once undergirded and fortified Israeli society.
And then there are the extremist settlers, who have appropriated the title “Religious Zionists,” to which they have no legitimate claim. They pose an even greater threat to Israel’s well-being than do the Haredim.
Led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, they dispatch their minions to isolated areas of the northern West Bank , where they populate deserted outposts or construct new ones, with or without government authorization. Hooligans and thugs, operating under their unofficial umbrella, harass Palestinian farmers, uprooting their olive trees and making their lives unbearable. When Palestinian terrorists kill Jewish Israelis, the thugs respond not by deferring to the army and police but by launching pogrom-like attacks on innocent civilians, sometimes killing and maiming women and children.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, of the far-right Religious Zionism party, speaking at the Knesset.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
And despite an occasional half-hearted word of regret, the Smotriches and Ben-Gvirs are more likely to rejoice in these attacks than condemn them. Their graphic, apocalyptic vision of Jewish tradition, which Yuval Noah Harari has rightly labelled“Hawara Judaism” flaunts every mitzvah, moral precept, and high ideal that Torah has to offer. As Rabbi Mosheh Lichtenstein of Har Etzion yeshiva has stated, every firebomb thrown at innocents is “a moral stain that taints us all.”
And what do their policies mean for Israel? They mean disaster, on every level.
They mean that brave soldiers—doing their duty for the Jewish state, contending with Hamas, Hezbollah, Iranian subversion in Syria, and Palestinian terror in the territories and in Israel—must now risk their time and their lives chasing Jewish pogromists, who see themselves impervious to the rule of law.
It means that perpetrators of far-right violence and settlement building in Israel have been emboldened, a reality that will lead to more clashes and unlawful activity.
It means that relations with the United States, Israel’s indispensable ally and an outspoken opponent of uncontrolled settlement expansion, have been gravely wounded, even among Israel’s most devoted American friends.
It means that friendly militaries around the world, which work closely with the Israel Defense Forces and strengthen their hands in multiple ways, have been sickened and horrified by the failure of Israel’s army to rein in the Jewish terrorists who run wild in the territories.
It means that the poisonous propaganda machines of the Israel haters around the world have been immeasurably strengthened.
Do the settler and Haredi parties speak for all Orthodox Jews in Israel? Surely not. There are many dissenters who support democracy and oppose their religious agenda. But as both Rabbi Lichtenstein and Mr. Harari make clear, little is heard from those who disagree.
In both Israel and America, the Orthodox dissenters sit in surreal silence, in a bubble of their own making, deferring to the radical religious parties that speak in their name.
Let us remember then: Winning Israel’s spirited and courageous battle for democracy will mean defeating Netanyahu, Levin, and their campaign of legal obfuscation and mendacity. But it will also mean defeating their religious enablers—the “Religious Zionists’ and the Haredim—without whom this entire ugly crisis would never have begun.
If Netanyahu wins, they win. And if they do, they will hijack Israel’s religious freedom, corrupt the Torah beyond recognition, and subject much of the Jewish people to a sordid fundamentalism that will sap their soul and destroy their spirit.
Eric H. Yoffie, a rabbi, writer and teacher in Westfield, New Jersey, is a former president of the Union for Reform Judaism. Twitter: @EricYoffie