As shown by the recent NIS 10,000 bill for ice cream at the taxpayers’ expense,
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu doesn’t like digging into his own pocket and
paying his own way. And yet, at the same time, he is acutely aware of some past
debts and seems determined to pay them off.
One of the reasons for
Netanyahu’s shock election victory over Shimon Peres in 1996, which brought him
to the Prime Minister’s Office for the first time, was the support of the haredi
public for his candidacy.
These elections were the first time the
electorate had two envelopes to place in the ballot box: one for the candidate
of their choice as prime minister and the second for the party of their choice,
and it was not axiomatic back then that the haredi public would back
Netanyahu.
First off, Peres had been an assiduous courter of the haredi
parties in the Knesset over the years. While Yitzhak Rabin, the epitome of the
Palmach-era sabra, made no effort to disguise his lack of religiosity – for
Rabin, the only thing sacred on a Shabbat morning was his regular tennis match
with his wife Leah – Peres in contrast would always fondly talk of his
rabbinical grandfather in Poland and his own religious zeal as a young man,
claiming to have smashed the family radio in Wiszniew when he found his parents
listening to it on Shabbat.
Secondly, as these elections were the first
(out of three elections, before the system was scrapped) for a directly elected
prime minister, the issue of a candidate’s character became highly relevant. The
secular, very American, thrice-married Netanyahu, who had also publically
confessed on prime-time television to cheating on his most recent wife, hardly
matched the haredi public’s own moral code.
But thanks to a racist
election campaign – “Bibi is good for the Jews” – funded by Australian mining
magnate and Chabad rabbi Joseph Gutnick, and energetically backed by the
Lubavitch movement, Netanyahu won over enough of the haredi vote to beat Peres
by a margin of 29,457 votes, less than one percent of the total number of votes
cast, and became prime minister, despite the Likud winning fewer seats than
Labor.
EVER SINCE, Netanyahu has closely allied himself to the
reactionary haredi world, even though their welfaredependent way of life runs
totally against his deeply held free-market beliefs. Netanyahu knows there is no
logic in the state investing billions of shekels in the independent Shas and
United Torah Judaism school systems, where pupils receive no secular education,
and are left unfit to join the modern workforce and thus condemned to a life of
government-subsidized poverty.
As the brother of a fallen military hero,
and a former IDF officer himself, the prime minister also knows there is no
moral justification for the government-sanctioned draft evasion of young haredi
men while the rest of the country’s Jewish teenagers face compulsory
enlistment.
And as a seasoned politician who devours opinion polls with
the same relish that other men read the sports pages, Netanyahu further knows
that last month’s elections were a clear vote in favor of ending the haredi
stranglehold on Israeli life.
The astonishing success of Yair Lapid’s
Yesh Atid party on the one hand, and the re-emergence of the religious-Zionist
camp under Naftali Bennett’s leadership of Bayit Yehudi, reflect a desire to see
the country’s economic, defense and civic burdens be shared equally, among all
sectors of the population.
IF NETANYAHU was a true leader, he would stop
his foot-dragging over the current coalition negotiations and work flat-out to
create the obvious coalition the election results have created: a government
headed by Likud Beytenu, with Yesh Atid and Bayit Yehudi as the main partners,
with Tzipi Livni’s and Shaul Mofaz’s parties adding extra ballast.
Such a
coalition would provide him both with a comfortable majority and enable his
government to tackle some of the country’s most pressing internal issues, such
as military service for all and weaning the haredim off government handouts. And
if, contrary to all expectations, any progress is made in negotiations with the
Palestinians, which would cause Bayit Yehudi to drop out, then Netanyahu could
confidently rely on backing from Labor and Meretz to ensure the negotiations’
continuance.
But no, our thrice-elected prime minister lacks the
political courage to cast off his one-time allies who once brought him to power
but who today prevent him from making the necessary reforms Israeli society both
wants and needs. Loyalty is an admirable quality but it is time for Netanyahu to
realize that his debt to the country’s future is far greater than any debt he
might owe the haredim.
The writer is a former editor-in-chief of The
Jerusalem Post.
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