Maof

Part 1

One of the prominent Israeli lawyers, Ruth Gabison, stated the following in her interview to the newspaper “Ha’aretz” Magazine on 12th November, 1999:
“In my view, foreign relations, the conduct of war, social-economic policies and order of priorities [of the political actions] are not justifiable. Nor are the political process and coalition agreements. So one of the most problematic judgments was the one that forced Prime Minster Rabin to fire [Interior Minister Aryeh] Deri before he had been indicted. I thought that was a mistaken decision on its own terms, but also one in which the court entered territory that is forbidden to enter. The decision of Justice [Dalia] Dorner barring entry [by Israeli authorities] to Orient House also lacked a legal basis. I did not like the behavior of Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu but he acted within the framework of his authority and took responsibility for the possible consequences, and the matter was part of his policy. …It is inconceivable for the court to intervene in such cases.”

Interestingly, Ms Gabison almost verbatim repeated the words of B. Z. Kahane regarding courts and the Israeli elite. She said:
“In a certain sense, the judicial system serves as the last refuge for elements of the old elites who feel that the only institution that is still under their control and represents their values is the court. So they have a natural tendency to aggrandize the power of the court and in fact to use it in order to curb or restrain the process of democratization.”

Probably the best comment on the current behavior of the Israeli judges came from the former President of the High Court Moshe Landau when he said in an interview published in Ha’aretz on October 6, 2000:
“It sometimes seems to me that most of the judges in the Supreme Court see themselves more or less as governing elders. In my view, this tendency is improper. First of all, because the justices take upon themselves a role that they are incapable of fulfilling, one that they haven't been trained to perform - because they were trained to judge, not to govern.”

Unfortunately, the Israeli ruling elite does not suffice with the total control of the court system and preservation of the flawed “election by party list” practice. Other influential tools that it successfully utilizes to retain the power are a low electoral threshold, which permits almost any organized group or political movement to get through to the Knesset, and a skillful exploitation of the specific Israeli religious parties. In essence, these elements of the political manipulation are well known as a principle of “divide and reign”.
The famous Jewish recipe “two man – three parties” provides a unique opportunity to split the society into myriads of parties, big and small. No wonder, that the number of political parties participating in the Israeli elections exceeds two dozen (in the election of 1999 – as many as 30).
Once all these parties reach the Knesset, they immediately commence the process of forming coalitions and parliamentary groups. For example, the number of such groups in the current Knesset reaches 22. This figure, however, remains far from the record achievement of the 9th Knesset (35 groups). Clearly, such composition of the parliament makes virtually impossible the formation of a coherent government or conducting of a consistent state policy.

The split in the Israeli society is only exacerbated by the existence of exclusively religious parties. This phenomenon deserves a separate serious conversation and it is not the subject of our analysis. Furthermore, this article does not have any intent in assigning blame for the division and hostility between the Haredim and the secular Israelis. For the sake of our discussion we shall only notice that the majority of Haredim do not regard Israel as their own State and have a feeling of being “despised stepdaughters”. As Noah Efron mentioned in his book “The Real Jews”,
“Ultra-orthodoxies accepted the Zionist rule as a fact of life and decided to co-operate with Zionists rather than confront them. But it did not mean that most ultra-Orthodox had adopted a positive view of the secular Jews who ran the new Israel.”
 
Nevertheless, joining their forces within various religious parties, ultra-Orthodox Jews or Haredim (as the secular Israelis call them) play a substantial role in the Israeli politics. Efron writes that Haredim concluded a kind of “Faustian bargain” with the Zionist State. They agreed to support the Government on the condition that the Government not intervenes in the areas which the ultra-orthodox communities traditionally consider to be their internal affairs, such as observance of Shabbat, matters of matrimony and divorce, Kashrut, Jewish education, and so on.

For example, in the first Knesset the United Religious Front (Agudat Israel and the Religious Zionists) held 16 mandates, so the Ben-Gurion’s Government had no option but to take them very seriously. The agreement between Ben-Gurion and the Agudat Israel had allowed the Government to acquire political support in exchange for the money allocated to social needs of the religious communities (Social Security, support of Jewish schools, and the like).

Meanwhile the Haredim continue treating the Israeli Government as a temporary authority. They obtained money from the British Government at the time of the Palestinian Mandate; they are equally happy to obtain money from the Israeli Government today. As far as they are concerned, the wellbeing of their communities remains the first priority, while the fate of the Zionist State is secondary.

The roots of this approach are hidden in the two thousand years of the Jewish Galut. The Jewish neighborhoods, locked behind the ghetto walls, could not even dream about statehood; their only concern was survival. Any money acquired from outside was a desirable bonus. For many Haredim, the State of Israel has the same image: they live in their ghettos which happen to be within the Zionist State, and wait for the Messiah. For them, the arriving of the Messiah is not necessarily associated with the existence of the State. The practical interests of the religious parties dictate them to support anti-religious parties such as Avoda and Meretz rather than the political Right which considers them to be natural allies. As a side-effect of this paradox, the presence of the religious parties on the Israeli political arena stimulates the creation of rabid anti-religious parties, whose electoral platform almost solely based on the hatred towards Haredim. The success of the Shinui Party duly proves this point.

Thus Moshe Feiglin’s statement that Israel does not need religious parties is perfectly rational from the prospective of the National camp. Since the Torah prohibits the giving away of any part of Eretz Israel, would be logical to expect that these parties would strongly oppose any territorial concessions, particularly to the Palestinian Arabs.  However, they do not perceive the secular Israeli government as being genuinely Jewish and thus see nothing wrong in exploiting their position to obtain the utmost financial benefits.  This is despite the coupled requirement to relinquish Jewish land (“temporarily”, as they want us to believe. They are completely familiar with the commandment to conquer and settle Eretz Yisrael, but who said when it must be done?)

In other words, the National camp can not automatically rely on the support of the religious parties; it has already suffered very painful blows from them. Here is a very illustrative example: the decision to vote against dissolution of the Knesset in December 2000 allowed the Shas party to retain their 17 mandates for a while, but rescued the Left camp from the inescapable defeat unanimously predicted by public opinion polls. Given that Netanyahu was 20% ahead of Barak, while Sharon – merely 3%, there is no doubt that Likud would support Netanyahu as PM candidate. Had the Likud party gathered the predicted 40+ mandates, Netanyahu would have easily beaten Barak and created a unique opportunity to lead a really Right-leaning Government. In his comment on the political situation on 14th December 2000, the leader of the Israel Beiteinu Party Avigdor Liberman said:
“For the first time, we have a chance to break a traditional stale-mate between the Left and the Right. Should the election happen, we would be able to form strong, homogeneous and stable government capable of ruling the country and free of the constant threat of collapse”.

Mr. Liberman had all the reasons for making such a statement. Firstly, the Leftist virus of defeatism, brought in after Sharon ascended to the Likud reign, did not yet infect the Likud party at that time. Secondly, the change of guard in the US gave Israel a real chance to conduct its own, more independent policy: the “peacemaker” Bill Clinton, so skillful in twisting Bibi’s hands, had been replaced by President George W. Bush, who proclaimed and demonstrated no intention to interfere in the Israeli-Palestinian relations during first one and half years of his presidency.

If we hypothesized that Netanyahu, a world-renowned expert in fighting terrorism, became a head of the “stable, united and Right-oriented Israeli Government”, the chain of events in the Middle East, following the Al-Qaida strike on the 9th of September 2001 in the US, could have been quite different …

End of the Part 2. To be continued…

September, 11, 2005
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Boris Shusteff is an engineer.  He is also a research associate with the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies.

Translated by R. Ganz.

Russian version