Splintering into tribes in the name of unity - Haaretz

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Thu., February 07, 2008 Adar1 1, 5768

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Last update - 11:00 06/02/2008

Splintering into tribes in the name of unity

By Avirama Golan

Tags: jerusalem, israel, orthodox

An emotional advertisement in the newspaper Hamodia this week urged ultra-Orthodox Jews to come to Jerusalem en masse yesterday. The Haredi community knew that this would be a political-diplomatic demonstration, but the official pretext was an injury to Haredi educational institutions. Only for that is it permissible to abandon Torah study and take to the streets.

Representatives of the national religious community also took part in the "mourning." Seemingly, this is a new alliance. In reality, it is a process that has gained strength in recent years and has made the Zionist rabbis superfluous, split the national religious movement and created new political splinter groups.

Professor Yisrael Aumann, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, recently joined one of these splinters. Ahi (literally, "my brother," but also a Hebrew acronym for "land, society and Judaism"), is a movement established by MKs Yitzhak Levy and Effie Eitam. It plans to hold a membership drive and then allow its members to directly elect its Knesset slate, because the negotiations it held on a joint list with two other factions, Moledet and Tekuma, failed. Levy and Eitam argue that the registration drive will redefine the leadership of the religious right, and in the end, everyone will reunite. But Tekuma, Moledet and the National Religious Party all protested the move in an angry letter to leading rabbis.

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It is hard to imagine the magnitude of the resentment percolating through the religious right. The only common denominator among the various splinters is the claim that all are working to unify the nation. In the name of this unification - and after the NRP was swallowed up in the National Union faction, along with Moledet (a party of religious and secular rightists) and Tekuma (a religious faction headed by rabbis) - Ahi is now threatening to shed the old NRP, headed by MK Zevulun Orlev, like a discarded skin.

Levy believes that this fragmentation strengthens the religious right, but it seems that most members of this community are disgusted by it. They are sick of the personal power struggles, and even Aumann's call to "stand as one man behind building up Israel as a Jewish state with a goal and a unique character," did not resonate with them. Perhaps because this community knows that the differences are essentially personal, while all the factions are concealing the true ideological rift.

This rift is reflected in a key issue that has sharpened since the disengagement, but whose roots go back to Gush Emunim: respect for the state. Growing segments of the religious community are abandoning the idea of a democratic state. Young settlement residents despise the idea, rabbis split hairs to explain that western democracy is a flawed product, and political leaders declare that a state that has betrayed its citizens does not deserve their loyalty.

The historic covenant between religious Zionism and the Labor movement, a leading rabbi wrote in the newspaper Hatzofeh this week, was a fraudulent bubble that has burst. Jews recognize only one covenant: with the Torah. Granted, the vast silent majority of religious Jews does not identify with this radicalization; it wants to continue the covenant - not with the historic Mapai party, but with the civic-national worldview. But even if this majority decides to split off from the nationalist and Torah-centered splinter movements, where can it go? On the other side, which ought to have been strengthened by the weakness and confusion of the right, there is nothing at all.

Right-wing politics is admittedly turning into a tool for the self-expression of narrow sectors, but one cannot deny its clear ideology. On the other side you have Kadima, a collection of self-interested people who came together solely to stay in power, and the Labor Party - supposedly a center-left party, but in practice, the representative of the wealthy business sector and various subsectors such as the kibbutzim and moshavim, whose sole interest is in clinging to key government offices.

All of these factions have one common denominator: All speak in the first person. Just two days ago, Defense Minister Ehud Barak announced, "I am not leaving the government" - as if he were not a party head but a contestant on the television show "Survivor" - and used the hollow excuse of the challenges facing the state. How does that differ from Eitam's excuse of "national unity," thanks to which he consistently undermines any leadership that is not himself?

In the face of the splintering right, the center and the so-called left are engaged in a disintegration of their own. Those who reject the anti-state extremism of the right will find no home there. Instead of the old Mapai - which, for all its flaws, at least offered a national vision - we are left with a group of tribes fighting for local, economic, ethnic or religious interests. Between these tribes, a huge vacuum has opened up, and the state and society are being abandoned in it.

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1.	Could`nt be clearer than that.	14:34	\|	Buzaglow	06/02/08

2.	broken down wall of partition	14:41	\|	alfred youngberg	06/02/08

3.	NOT YET	16:53	\|	soggy liberal	06/02/08

4.	Is democracy holy?	17:58	\|	tam ehad	06/02/08

5.	What`s wrong with democracy?	18:06	\|	Shlomo	06/02/08

6.	Neo Non-Haredism Loves certain people more than you	22:32	\|	Yechiel	06/02/08

7.	Avirama	12:53	\|	j10	07/02/08

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