Election threat over? Not as far as Israeli politicians are concerned

It all began three months ago, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s threat to dissolve the government over the Israel Public Broadcasting Corporation nonsense. The threat has been forgotten, but the political system panicked. Like in a false pregnancy, there are no elections in sight, but everyone is acting as if they are in the middle of an election campaign. Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon’s recent ad campaign is pure elections. He is almost naïve in his audacity. The “political jobs bill,” which passed a preliminary reading last week, points to Knesset members’ anxiety over what will happen to them the day after elections. They want to be directors in governmental companies, although they have never read a balance sheet in their life. They want to offer jobs to their supporters in the primary elections. They are demanding the state fund their primaries. They have no shame.

Finance Minister Kahlon. A pure election campaign (Photo: Motti Kimchi)

The ultra-Orthodox parties’ recent moves scream for elections. Shas leader Aryeh Deri was defeated in the last elections: His party lost four Knesset seats. He wants to correct course, and one demand follows another. Last week, Deri and his colleagues forced Netanyahu to cancel the Western Wall compromise agreement and adopt the Conversion Bill. A law banning commerce on Shabbat is already on the horizon. These moves are unusual because they strive for achievements beyond the Haredi sector. In the past, when the Haredi parties targeted issues sensitive to the non-Haredi majority, they found themselves outside the government. There is a risk involved. But when the government is handing out loot on a daily basis, they can’t control themselves. Netanyahu hopes someone else will pull his chestnuts out of the fire. It’s the High Court judges' job to save him from the Western Wall disgrace; it’s up to rebel lawmakers from the coalition to stop the Conversion Bill. Reform Jews are not the only ones affected by the Conversion Bill; it also, and perhaps mainly, hurts Orthodox rabbis—like the Tzohar organization—who are interested in converting immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The Haredim don’t want to convert people. As far as they’re concerned, the fewer Jews the better. They work on demography at home, in the bedroom, not in the conversion studios.

The Haredim don’t accept the Rabbinate’s authority, but they control it by the state’s power of coercion. If I’m not mistaken, that’s a unique Israeli phenomenon.

The first ones who should have been outraged are the rabbis and politicians of the Bayit Yehudi party, but they’re afraid. Minister Yuval Steinitz, who fought the Haredi demands in the cabinet last week, found himself alone against 10 ministers.

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