TOP STORY: ELECTION CROSSROADS: Religious-party gains show deep split on Israel’s future

c. 1996 Religion News Service JERUSALEM (RNS)-It was like a tent-meeting revival-Israeli-style. A crowd of plainly-dressed men and women crowded into a large hall, stood up and publicly pledged their vote to the”holy Shas Party, and then were blessed by a charismatic rabbi who promised them long life, health and marital bliss. That kind of”down […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM (RNS)-It was like a tent-meeting revival-Israeli-style.

A crowd of plainly-dressed men and women crowded into a large hall, stood up and publicly pledged their vote to the”holy Shas Party, and then were blessed by a charismatic rabbi who promised them long life, health and marital bliss.


That kind of”down home”Judaism may have been one of the biggest factors in the stunning upset election victory of right-wing Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu.

Although Israel’s recent election was billed to the outside world as a referendum on the Arab-Israeli peace process, many Israelis saw the vote as a crossroads on another, equally divisive issue-the religious identity of the 48-year-old Jewish state.

Netanyahu, while himself a secular politician, forged a potent alliance with a series of small religious parties that endorsed his candidacy for prime minister in return for his promises of power in the cabinet of the future government.

The religious parties, it turned out, commanded much more popular support than anyone had predicted, a following that helped hand Netanyahu his narrow 50.5-49.5 percent victory.

The post-election picture that has emerged is one of a nation deeply split between the staunchly secular philosophy of Israel’s left-wing leaders, who pioneered negotiations with the PLO, and the religious orthodoxy of Netanyahu’s new allies, who believe their first mission is to restore Judaism to Israel, rather than to integrate into the Arab world.”I believe that Prime Minister Shimon Peres lost because he and the Labor Party were identified with the secular left,”said the liberal Orthodox rabbi David Hartman in a post-election interview.

Unlike past U.S. presidential races, the campaign was not about the personal morality of the candidates, but rather about which segments of Israel’s population they would represent.

The ultimate vote expressed the alienation of many Israelis, particularly those of Middle Eastern origins, from Peres’ vision of a secular Israeli state assimilated into a”New Middle East.””They (voters) don’t want to be the Paris of the Middle East,”said Hartman.”They don’t want secularization.” Netanyahu, thrice married and once involved in a public romantic scandal, talked a more populist language of Jewish roots and legacy. He sought an election-eve blessing from a mystical Rabbi Yitzhak Kadouri and peppered his victory speech with Bible passages.

Simmering ethnic tensions, which many Israelis believed had disappeared, also surfaced again in the fateful vote. Sephardic or Middle Eastern-born Jews, who tend to be more traditional and clustered in lower-income groups, voted overwhelmingly for Netanyahu as prime minister, and they supported religious parties like Shas in a separate parliamentary race.


European-born Jews and Israeli-Arabs, on the other hand, voted for Peres in tandem with the secular Labor and leftist parliamentary candidates.

When Sephardi religious party leaders distributed blessings and amulets to their political followers, such tactics were denounced by secular left-wing politicians as”voodoo”politics.

Still, the campaign of mystics and healers, blessings and amulets, struck a powerful chord among deeply traditional Middle Eastern Jews-who also resented the condescending remarks of liberal critics.”There is a folk religion in the Sephardic community which touches on very deeply felt emotions about the holy man, and blessings and curses emanating from him,”noted Hartman.”Rationalism has not uprooted those sentiments. People still live as very vulnerable human beings, susceptible to these mystical powers.”The left loves to see this in order to make fun of it. But they don’t offer any kind of alternative Judaism, which would give a Jewish (spiritual) dimension to this society, but would have respect for human rights, pluralism, and freedom of conscience.” Similarly, on social and economic issues the left-wing parties were perceived by many Israelis as elitist groups, which drew the bulk of their support from the business community and the upscale suburbs of Tel Aviv. That’s in stark contrast to the early years of the state, when left-wing Jews founded socialist kibbutzim and labor movements.

In contrast, the religious and right-wing parties were anchored in poor towns and neighborhoods that missed out on the economic boom of the peace era-a boom that saw the gap between Israel’s rich and poor widen into a chasm larger than in almost any other country in the developed world.

While the rich have reaped the economic benefits of peace in the form of new international trade and business ties, the religious parties have taken it upon themselves to care for the poor and bolster their dignity, noted Israeli commentator Iris Mizrachi.

While the rich lit candles at peace rallies, religious groups like Shas were providing subsidized day care to pre-schoolers, hot meals to the elderly and aid to drug addicts, she observed.”Without a doubt, the great demise of the government was its complete disregard for a third and fourth generation of poverty,”said Mizrachi.”When you rob a man of his dignity and he lives on the poverty line, he turns to the only power that can restore at least his honor-he turns to God.” Now, with the largest proportion ever of religious members in Israel’s incoming parliament-or Knesset-Israelis are trying to figure out how the new right-wing religious alliance will affect their daily lives.


Many of the poor and traditionally religious expect to see Netanyahu reward religious party leaders with appointments as ministers of housing, welfare, education and religion-wielding billions of dollars in government budgets.

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Those appointments mean that more money will be pumped into informal systems of low-cost housing, subsidized educational programs, welfare and religious study controlled and operated by the religious parties. Religious nationalist Jewish settlers living in the West Bank, meanwhile, also are hopeful that a four-year government freeze on the expansion of settlements will end.

Still, secular Israeli critics warn that the religious leaders will use their new power and budgets for patronage and political paybacks, rather than to promote greater social equity. While some groups may benefit from the new aid, other economically disadvantaged sectors, such as Israel’s Arab citizens, could suffer.

Israeli religious leaders, moreover, have almost nothing to say about Netanyahu’s adamant free-market economic policies, which may lead not only to a massive privatization of government-held companies, but also to a rollback of recent gains in environmental protection and national health insurance.”The religious parties, while doing a lot of charity work, don’t have a platform on how you deal with issues like poverty and welfare,”observes Hartman.”That is one of the great weaknesses of religion in this society. The focus has been on external symbols and ritual elements, not on the larger social and political vision.”(END OPTIONAL TRIM)

In the legislative arena, meanwhile, religious political leaders are now signaling that they may use their new political power to push through new laws that would curb abortion, increase religious education in the state school system and preserve the monopoly of the Orthodox religious establishment on”personal status”issues such as marriage and divorce.

The scenario is particularly worrisome to non-Orthodox groups such as Israel’s Union for Progressive Judaism, which has fought hard to win limited government recognition for non-Orthodox conversion, marriage and burial over the past four years.”We are talking about massive allocations to all sorts of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox religious institutions, discrimination against Christians, against non-Jews and Jews who are non-Orthodox,”says Anat Galili, a spokeswoman for the movement.


Some Israeli educators also fear that there may be rollbacks in many of the new programs undertaken by the Labor government promoting Arab-Jewish co-existence, democracy and Jewish pluralism.”We opened up the teaching of religion and Bible in the public schools to a more pluralistic approach. We showed them that there are many ways to be Jewish. I pray the new government won’t retreat backwards. But I’m not 100 percent sure,”says Yehoshua Amishav, a spokesman for the Education Ministry.

Yitzhak Rath, a spokesman for the National Religious Party, one of the Orthodox groups that won a large parliamentary representation, says the fears represent an attempt to”demonize”religious parties by the secular public.”What happened was a vote of the public-which decided that it prefers children to grow up with a little Jewish culture, rather than the Canaanite (pagan) culture that was represented by the left,”said Rath.

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Hartman, meanwhile, hopes that the newly empowered religious parties will resist the temptation to impose a long series of new religious edicts on secular Israelis, who have long resented clerical intrusion into their personal lives.”If the religious political parties take the typical stance of legislative coercion, if they are going to use the Knesset to make this society Jewish rather than persuasive arguments, then we are going to have a civil war,”he warned.”The issue is if Jewish tradition can offer anything meaningful to enrich this society. It has to speak from a voice of inspiration and vision, and not of anger and coercion.”

MJP END FLETCHER

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