Is the Marriage Between Haredim and Israeli Ultranationalists Beginni

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Is the Marriage Between Haredim and Israeli Ultranationalists Beginni…

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Had he not been scythed down in his prime nine and a half years ago, this weekend would have been the 77th birthday of David Landau – the former Haaretz editor-in-chief and founding editor of its international English edition that you are now reading.

Those of us who were fortunate enough to have had him as our mentor when we were young journalists have often found ourselves asking in these past dark months: "What would David have said?"

He was an astute and immensely knowledgeable observer of Israel and Jewish life, who never allowed his boundless love for both to cloud his judgment. That doesn't mean, of course, that all his observations and judgments were necessarily right. But you can learn almost as much from the wrong calls of a wise person as you can from what they got right.

Nine months ago, just before the war began, I finished rereading David's seminal book "Power and Piety," on modern Jewish fundamentalism in Israel and the Diaspora. It was published in 1993 and I hadn't read in 25 years. I was amused to rediscover that the final chapter was titled "Peace in Their Time," and ended with Shas having joined Yitzhak Rabin's Labor government in the summer of 1992.

This is how the last passage in the book begins: "The Haredim, then, led by Shas, were on the cutting edge of Israel's move towards peace and regional conciliation."

דוד לנדאו

Former Haaretz editor-in-chief David Landau, who would have been 77 this weekend.Credit: Alex Levac

I remembered that sentence this week when, in the wake of the governing coalition crisis caused by the failure to pass the so-called rabbis law, Shas ministers and lawmakers rushed to give interviews promising that they had no intention of bringing down the right-wing government. How much has changed in Israel's religious politics over those past 32 years.

Lest you think me churlish for commemorating David with one of his mistakes, I have to add that religious politics was one of his special subjects. He was unique among Israeli journalists in being the only one to have a direct line to many of the senior rabbis of his day. That included Shas' spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, whom he had known well since the early 1970s, while writing for a secular newspaper that was openly and fiercely critical of them. No one understood them or could articulate their ideology to a general audience as well as David.

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And he was right at the time. Rabbi Ovadia's decision to enter Rabin's coalition – where the other main partner beside Labor was the left-wing Meretz party, which had just achieved its best ever result by winning 12 Knesset seats – was momentous. Unthinkable for the more hidebound, Ashkenazi, ultra-Orthodox party United Torah Judaism. If Shas and Meretz could sit around the same cabinet table, then peace between Israel and its neighbors was in reach.

A few months after the book was published, it seemed as if David had been vindicated. The Israeli government, with Shas a member, and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords.

I'll spare you how it all went downhill from there – you know the story.

The most important political development of the last three decades is how the Haredim, their political power growing due to demography, abandoned their dovish positions and shifted sharply to the far-right end of the political spectrum.

We can't say for certain that the Oslo process would have necessarily succeeded if the ultra-Orthodox had not joined the ultranationalists. There is plenty of blame on the Palestinian side as well for its failure. But without this shift, Israel would not have been ruled by Likud governments for 22 of the last 30 years. Benjamin Netanyahu would not have become Israel's longest-serving prime minister. And even when Likud was in power, it would have governed with more moderate coalitions than the extreme one now in power.

Allied with Jewish supremacists

Whether or not those governments in an alternative Israeli history would have succeeded in making peace with the Palestinians, the bottom line is that in 32 years, we've gone from an Israel where the main Haredi party was the left's partner in trying to bring peace to the land, to an Israel where the ultra-Orthodox are allied with the Jewish supremacists.

In retrospect, it was inevitable. Back in 1990, two years before Shas joined the Rabin government, Rabbi Elazar Menachem Shach – the spiritual leader of the "Lithuanian," non-Hasidic stream and early patron of Shas (though it broke away from his patronage) – delivered his famous speech where he accused the kibbutzim of raising "rabbits and pigs." He further claimed that while the Haredim were not nationalists, they could not work with the godless left.

מליאת הכנסת פטור גיוס 11.6.24

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu smiling in the Knesset earlier this month after the Haredi draft exemption bill passed.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi

Shach had less supporters than Rabbi Ovadia, but he and his successors were more consistent. Within the stratified rabbinical leadership, an aging Ovadia was increasingly isolated and ultimately fell in line.

Then there was Arye Dery, Shas' political leader and ostensibly Ovadia's servant. But Dery's corrupt practices and fondness for bribes and other forbidden gifts put him in the crosshairs of the police and the courts. He went from being the favored coalition partner of Rabin and Shimon Peres to Netanyahu's key ally. It didn't matter that Ovadia had no interest in this alliance. Ultimately, those he entrusted to run the party's political affairs forced him into it.

But it would be wrong to blame just the craven rabbis and politicians.

Joining the right wing was a much more natural fit for the younger Haredi voters. They had been told for so many years that the secular leftists were out to destroy Yiddishkeit. Not only was the right more religious, it offered them an easier path to being Israeli patriots as well. They didn't have to serve in the army or join the workforce: Just hate the Arabs and accept that Netanyahu was God's chosen leader, and they could belong.

The alliance may be coming to its end. Netanyahu is clinging on to power, but he has no real future in the aftermath of the war in Gaza. He can't deliver the legislation the Haredim demand – especially not a renewal of the law exempting yeshiva students from military service. And large swaths of the right have turned against the ultra-Orthodox, demanding they either serve or be ostracized.

Neither is an alliance with the religious right an easy fit anymore. Most of the religious Zionist community is on the side of those who serve, and the supremacists, like Itamar Ben-Gvir, are anarchists who the staid Haredim find it hard to deal with.

It's far too early to predict a renewal of the alliance between Shas and the center-left. It and the rest of the Haredi community has been swept much too far to the extremes to make that viable in the foreseeable future. There is true hatred on either side that has to be overcome first. But a trend that has been decades in the making may be about to start shifting slowly into reverse.