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David Horovitz: Ejected
David Horovitz
For the first time in a generation, ultra-Orthodox politicians are not in government. Our last prime minister, the hapless Ehud Barak, clung to Shas despite the pleadings of his own Labor activists. Ariel Sharon, by contrast, has ejected the ultra-Orthodox to the dismay, even horror, of his own Likud.
As the most popular prime minister in recent history -- and in a period of security, diplomatic and economic crises, at that -- Sharon plainly knows a thing or two about public sentiment. He has cast the Sephardi and Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox legislators into the unfamiliar political wilderness because he knows that is where most of the public wants to see them. And they have only themselves to blame for that.
There is nothing inherently unacceptable about rabbi-politicians championing their communities in the same way as the immigrant, Israeli Arab, pro-settler and other sectoral and single-issue parties champion theirs. Where Shas and United Torah Judaism have acted so harmfully these past two decades is in playing off the (former) two major parties, Likud and Labor, against each other, to such cynically devastating effect: They have over the years extracted for their communities funding so manifestly disproportionate, and legislation so manifestly unfair, as to have alienated that huge sector of the electorate that regards itself as traditionally Jewish and instinctually supportive of the ultra-Orthodox.
Sharon's accurate sense of the public mindset reflects the cumulative national fury born of year after year impotently watching as double and triple funding flowed -- from the Interior Ministry, the Education Ministry, the Religious Affairs Ministry, and other sources -- to ultra-Orthodox educational institutions that often turned out not to exist or to have compiled registers of fictional students. Year after year witnessing with mounting rage as this or that United Torah Judaism leader managed the Knesset Finance Committee as a personal fiefdom. Year after year angrily reading allegations about the allocation of funds to local government by the Shas-controlled Interior Ministry on the understanding that "x" number of new mikvahs and "y" number of new synagogues would be built by City Hall. Year after year smarting at the unholy injustice with which David Ben-Gurion�s dispensation to excuse the best and the brightest Talmudic minds from army service -- so that they might serve the Jewish nation in their own way via full-time study -- has been exploited by some of the worst and the dullest, who ignore the religious imperative to provide for their families.
The ultra-Orthodox politicians have not only used their power to discriminate intolerably against the rest of Israel, they have also failed their own publics. Shas -- the self-styled protector of the Sephardi underclass -- has inflated its educational network into a bloated instrument of regression. It has extracted public funds to subsidize classes to the extent that no impoverished parents can afford to send their offspring anywhere else, but it has provided that captive classroom audience with few of the tools the youngsters need to break into solid wage-earning professions, thereby cynically perpetuating the cycle of Shas dependence. As the years have passed, meanwhile, Shas�s once respected spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, has become notorious for his intemperate utterances on the status of women, on Arabs, on our democracy and those who try to uphold it, on those who do not subscribe to his vision of observance.
Sharon's surprising, Savvy, exclusion of these parties presents their replacement, Shinui, with an extraordinary opportunity. It has been the aggrieved insistence of Shinui leader Tommy Lapid that his is not a party of hatred, some strange Jewish offshoot of anti-Semitism, but, rather, is dedicated to countering the abuse of the political system. Shinui professes to favor a fair-minded approach to the allocation of national resources -- and has asserted that it would be as offended by the discriminatory under-funding of some sectors as it has been by the over-funding perfected by the men of Shas and UTJ. Having now gained control of the all-important Interior Ministry, Shinui will have the chance to prove the point.
In selecting the Interior Ministry for his deputy, Avraham Poraz -- along with the Justice Ministry for himself, and the hitherto marginalized Environment Ministry for colleague Yehudit Naot -- Lapid, as ever, has proved himself so much cannier than Labor. Messrs. Peres and Ben-Eliezer chose the high profile Foreign Affairs and the Defense Ministries when they joined the 2001 unity government, and found themselves tarred with any and all diplomatic and security failures and unable to challenge Sharon in claiming the few successes.
If Shinui�s ministers come to be seen as principled and decent in the distribution of their ministerial responsibilities, the party may prove to be more than the usual fast-collapsing flash in the centrist pan. Moreover, if it treats the ultra-Orthodox community fairly, Shinui could break the dependence of some of the most downtrodden Israelis on the rabbi-politicians who have so ill-served them, and change the face of domestic politics for the better, and for good.
Newly ex-Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai, the shell-shocked Shas political leader, has been lamenting the prime minister�s sudden, unaccountable display of "great hatred for the Orthodox public." In truth, by closing the coalition door to the great manipulators, Sharon may have done that community -- and the rest of the nation -- an enormous service.
March 24, 2003
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