In view of the abject failure of Shas and United Torah Judaism as an opposition force, some are beginning to wonder whether there is any need for ultra-Orthodox parties today.
Five interviews with politicians appeared in the Passover-eve issue of the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) weekly Bakehilah ("In the Community"). Benjamin Lipkin, the magazine's editor, who interviewed the five, chose them from across the legitimate (to the minds of the ultra-Orthodox) political spectrum. They included two secular politicians, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz (Likud) and MK Danny Yatom (Labor), two from the National Religious camp, deputy ministers Yitzhak Levy and Zvi Hendel, and only one ultra-Orthodox representative, MK Meir Porush.
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Surprisingly or not, MK Porush was the only one who was asked critical, sometimes even hostile, questions. When Porush brought up his hunger strike about a year ago in protest against Finance Ministry policies, Lipkin responded cynically, "that strike was your last practical step against the government." When Porush spoke of his speeches in the Knesset plenary, the response was scathing: "Your voice was almost unheard in the media."
The message that threaded its way through the whole interview, and which extended to all Haredi Knesset members, was crystal clear. As an opposition, they have utterly failed. But another, much more far-reaching, message lurked between the lines. It is a question that has been floating around in the ultra-Orthodox political air for a while now: Are the ultra-Orthodox political parties passe? Should the ultra-Orthodox community be involving itself in the larger, general parties - assuming, that is, that from within these parties Haredi politicians can serve the interests of their constituents better than at present?
The fact that the question can come up at all shows that the Haredi public now isolates itself far less from mainstream Israeli society than it has in the past. At the political level, almost all ultra-Orthodox see themselves as part of the radical right. They identify with the settlers and the Yesha Council (of Jewish Settlements of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza District). They enthusiastically support targeted killings and Israel Defense Forces actions in the territories. Some 50,000 ultra-Orthodox live in two towns in the territories, Modi'in Ilit and Betar Ilit, a fact that serves to further strengthen their sense of shared destiny with the settlers.
Sabbath as a social struggle
It is hard to find major Haredi public figures that are ready to openly deny the need for Haredi political parties. Aryeh Deri is the first to say they may not be necessary.
"The time has come to rethink the need for Haredi parties," the former Shas leader told Haaretz. "I know I'm not the only one who thinks so. Important ultra-Orthodox rabbis have been thinking along these lines for a number of years. My views aren't crystallized at this point and I have no clear plans to establish an alternative, but I am completely clear on the fact that the matter must be reconsidered. Nowhere in the Ten Commandments does it say there have to be ultra-Orthodox parties."
Deri believes that the justification for the Haredi parties in the `50s and `60s "when the ultra-Orthodox were an endangered minority," no longer exists now that "the Haredi public has become an undeniable fact." In the first years of the State, he explained, the ultra-Orthodox needed parties that would look after their rights in areas like education and kashrut. Today, Deri continued, "the state of the laws of supply and demand in a free-market economy are what make sure that these things exist."
The ultra-Orthodox, he said, are part of a wider community "that includes the Orthodox, the traditional and the newly religious," and this group has influence and power even without the ultra-Orthodox parties. "No one needs the ultra-Orthodox parties so that food companies or hotels will want to have kashrut certificates," Deri elaborated. "They themselves want these certificates so they can sell their goods and services to the ultra-Orthodox public."
Deri and his family spent last Passover at a bed-and-breakfast belonging to Kibbutz Matzuba. "Everything there is strictly kosher," he says. "Who needs more proof than that for my argument?"
Deri believes that the existence of ultra-Orthodox parties antagonizes the secular public, bringing about "phenomena like Shinui, that makes secular people think that the ultra-Orthodox want to force their lifestyle on them." In short, said Deri, the ultra-Orthodox parties "create hatred and confrontation without being very useful." As long as the ultra-Orthodox continue to operate within sectarian political parties, Deri stressed, the usefulness of such parties in terms of serving Haredi interests "will be small and the damage, in my humble opinion, will be great. Therefore, I propose that the Haredi public start thinking about the possibility of getting involved in another, wider framework. Perhaps a party of ultra-Orthodox, Orthodox and traditionalists, or perhaps a framework outside of a political party that will operate, for example, the way Jews do in the U.S.
The way the party structure stands now, Deri added, "the Haredi parties have let the big parties off the hook in terms of looking after Jewish issues, and the result is that the moment a government was formed without the Haredi parties, no one looked after these things." Deri proposes that the big parties should "know that it is their responsibility, and [then] they will behave as they did when it came to the civil marriage law."
According to Deri, the main internal struggle that Israeli society will face after "the implementation of the disengagement puts an end to political debate," will be "the cultural struggle for the general character of the state. On the one hand are Shinui and others who want a completely Western and totally free country, and on the other hand, the whole public, that wants the country to be - to one degree or another - a Jewish state." The ultra-Orthodox, he said, have got to get involved in this struggle together with traditional Jews in the Likud and other parties.
Deri believes that cooperation of this type can only be helpful to religious struggles. "The struggle over the [opening of businesses on the] Sabbath can be a social struggle. After all, opening the malls on Saturday is antisocial, it hurts small businesses and businessmen like me, who want to take part in tenders but can't submit a bid for a project that operates on the Sabbath. When you present the struggle over the Sabbath as a religious issue, you lose the battle before you start. If you present it as a social issue, you'll have a chance of success."
David Tal precedent
Considering Deri's views, it very well may be that more attention should be paid to ultra-Orthodox MK David Tal (One Nation), the first ultra-Orthodox person to be elected by a non-Haredi party, than has been accorded him thus far. Tal, a former Deri loyalist in Shas, left the party at the end of the last Knesset term, first joining the Likud and immediately thereafter moving to One Nation, on whose ticket he was elected to the present Knesset.
At this point it looks like Tal's efforts to become part of a non-Haredi party have not gone well, especially because MK Amir Peretz, chairman of One Nation, has an eye on returning to Labor. If and when that happens, Tal, who refused to be interviewed for this article, will have to make a decision about his political future. The Likud has already seen to it that a law was passed to allow him to move into its ranks as an MK.
Another interesting phenomenon is the creation of a religious lobby in the Likud, headed by MKs Eli Aflalo and Daniel Benlulu. This lobby, and not the ultra-Orthodox parties, led the struggle against the transfer of the rabbinic courts to the Justice Ministry.
Before being elected to the Knesset, MK Israel Eichler (United Torah Judaism) used to believe, like Deri does, that there is no reason for the separate existence of Haredi parties.
"I thought that even if there were no Haredi parties, no one would dare infringe on the basic rights of the ultra-Orthodox public," Eichler said. "I believed that the basic human rights of the ultra-Orthodox were assured just like those of the rest of the groups in the population, and that we could adopt the American model. In the U.S. there are no religious parties; religious people vote for either Republicans or Democrats."
But, Eichler stresses, "the policies of the present government, which uses state budgets to do damage to the Haredi community, have proved to me that this is not the case; the Haredi community needs Haredi political power to defend it." Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, he noted, are not carrying out economic policies, but "leading a war to the bitter end against the ultra-Orthodox through economic means." If they really wanted to reduce the state budget, he argued, they would cut salary expenditures in the public sector and save a lot more than they did cutting the benefits to large families."
"They tell the ultra-Orthodox `get a job' while they know that there are no jobs, because all they want is to get the ultra-Orthodox out of the yeshivas. We realize that even the Likud, not only Shinui and the left, want there to be no ultra-Orthodox here, and even a man like Sharon, who had a favorable attitude toward the ultra-Orthodox in the past, kicks us around mercilessly now." Eichler believes that the Haredi public understands that in a situation like this, Haredi parties must be preserved and strengthened.
Meir Porush, another UTJ Knesset member who never approved of the "American model" even in the past, believes that the need for the continued existence of Haredi parties stems from the fact that "without political lobbying, not one basic need of the Haredi public can be ensured." That's the way it's always been, he said, from the days of David Ben-Gurion to Ehud Barak. "But now the situation is a lot worse. It's harder because all the rules of the game have changed," Porush added. "Today we have a hostile coalition of hostile parties with hostile ministers."
According to Porush, "Meir Porush's child won't be in the same situation as the child of secular parents. Secular parents already know, the day their child is born, that he is assured a kindergarten and a school." On the other hand, "the parents of the Haredi child know that without the political lobbying of Haredi MKs, the Haredi education system might collapse. Today we have a government that really might bring down all the things that are important to the ultra-Orthodox. If the Haredi parties don't exist, who will even look twice at the ultra-Orthodox? Who will give them a thought?"
Porush dismissed the argument that the Likud has a religious lobby that will see to it that these things never happen. According to Porush, "Eli Aflalo and his friends are being steered by the ultra- Orthodox. If we weren't in the Knesset, who would have heard of this lobby?"
Pig, robber, Haman
Both Porush and Eichler have a hard time explaining why their party hasn't managed to function as an opposition worth its salt. There is a sense among large segments of the Haredi and secular public that the Haredi parties have disappeared from the political arena and perhaps even ended their historic role. Both men believe that this feeling is baseless, and both try to convincingly highlight their work in the opposition, focusing on the number of times they were ejected from the Knesset plenary.
"I was thrown out of the session because I called Justice Cheshin a pig and the media didn't leave me alone," Porush recalled. "I did it because of Cheshin's statement in favor of the selling of pork, but I will not call cabinet members `pigs' just to get a headline," he qualified.
"We're always yelling and we always hear people say we don't yell loudly enough," explained MK Eichler. "At the opening of the Knesset's winter session I called the prime minister a "robber" and they threw me out of the plenary. The whole country was talking about it. But all the media lost interest in us because we had become irrelevant."
Shas activists also prefer to put the blame for their disappearance on the media. "Last year I released more statements to the press than I did all the years I was a cabinet minister, but most of the media ignored most of my statements," complained Shas chairman MK Eli Yishai. "I'm not angry, because I understand that this is natural. When we were in the government, we had important ministries and we were always in the center of the political debate. It was easy to get headlines."
Yishai called the claim that Shas has disappeared from the political arena "a fashionable argument that has no basis in reality. We are part of a small and divided opposition that is forced to operate opposite a homogenous coalition that tramples us, one in which it is very hard to find cracks," he explained. "In all the governments in which we took part, there were ministers with social agendas that cooperated with Shas in its opposition to economic policy. This is the first government in which there is total ideological unity. Everyone goes along with the Finance Ministry's anti-social policies.
"In a situation like this it's very difficult to be an efficient opposition, but we are fighting all the time. We minimized some of the economic sanctions, we fought against the awarding of the Israel Prize to Yigal Tumarkin, and it was MK Meshulam Nahari [Shas] who first revealed the treasury's secret documents [that monies had been secretly earmarked for NRP-affiliated yeshivas and settlements]. I called [Interior Minister] Avraham Poraz `Haman' and [Justice Minister] Yosef (Tommy) Lapid a "destroyer of Israel."
Roi Lahmanovitch, Shas spokesman and Eli Yishai's media advisor, was able to add a few more achievements to the not-so-impressive list declaimed by his party chairman: Shas was able to engineer the election of its favorites to the offices of both the Sephardi and the Ashkenazi chief rabbi, though their opponents were backed by the coalition's National Religious Party. In addition, Lahmanovitch noted, politicians across the spectrum, including Shaul Mofaz, Limor Livnat, Yossi Beilin and Yael Dayan, have recently sought meetings with Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, to garner the support of the party. Shas was also behind a recent spate of no-confidence votes that "had the coalition proud that it survived by one vote," according to Lahmanovitch.
As Lahmanovitch described it, when Eli Yishai traveled across the country over the past two weeks, he made sure to visit soup kitchens run by charitable associations. "It's a strategy," he explained, intended to make Shas a social alternative to the Likud. "On all my tours I met people who want to see us return to the government," Yishai said. "Shas has not disappeared. The need for it is stronger now than ever. Light is never seen as clearly as from within the darkness."
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