organization:national religious party

ISRAEL. Sur les promesses vaines de Lapid-Bennett et leur alliance, qui repose sur des voeux pieux

Enough with the Lapid-Bennett ’brotherhood’ - Opinion - Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper
▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/enough-with-the-lapid-bennett-brotherhood.premium-1.530973

The story of the “brothers” was bad news from the start. In the 2013 election, Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) garnered the votes of Kadima. Naftali Bennett (Habayit Hayehudi) got those of the National Religious Party. Kadima’s constituents did not cast ballots for Lapid so their votes would transform Uri Ariel into the housing minister responsible for bringing hundreds of thousands of settlers to Judea and Samaria. The NRP electorate did not vote for Bennett so that former Shin Bet chief Jacob Perry (one of the “gatekeepers”) would become the science minister fighting tooth and nail against the occupation.

The Lapid-Bennett alliance benefited from the support of the media that hates Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it was fundamentally a mistaken alliance. It couldn’t have come into the world and couldn’t have survived without betraying the trust that each of the “brothers” received from his electorate.

To this day it’s not clear what motivated the prince of Israel’s Channel 2 and the prince of Judea and Samaria to fall into each other’s arms. But their strange alliance enabled them to sell three illusions: the illusion that the Palestinians are a thorn in the behind, the illusion that the new finance minister and the new economy minister could engender groundbreaking socioeconomic change, and the illusion that by working together the two Facebook stars could integrate the Haredim into 21st-century Israel. Yet three months after Yesh Atid and Habayit Hayehudi formed a government, these three illusions have been dispelled.

As the head of the Israel Defense Forces’ Central Command has warned, the Palestinian problem, which has been suppressed, is about to blow up in our faces. As the state budget has demonstrated, the present economic policy – which does not fulfill the promise of the new politics – is clearly that of former Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz. And as the dynamics of the “universal service” debate have attested, Haredim are not about to become integrated into the Israeli army and Israeli society in the near future; instead they will be pushed into a ghetto of anger and extremism. The three layers of concrete that ostensibly formed the foundation of the Lapid-Bennett alliance have disintegrated in less than 100 days. All that’s left is plaster – plaster that is beginning to disintegrate as well.

Lapid, behind closed doors, is promising that everything is about to change. After he passes the budget and a law that “more equally divides the burden,” he will be able to speak his truth on the Palestinian issue loud and clear. If Lapid is not being deceitful in these private conversations, the alliance with Bennett will soon be history or farce.

At the same time, leading members of Habayit Hayehudi are wondering whether they were too hasty to betray the Haredim and whether they should renew the rapprochement between the knitted-skullcap guardians of the Torah and the black-clad ones. If intra-religious rapprochement does indeed happen, the religious Zionist alliance with Lapid will become either farce or history. The strangeness that has always been concealed in this alliance will be exposed. What looked exciting and promising around Purim could end up looking ridiculous just five months later, after Tisha B’Av.

So the challenge now is Lapid’s. If he continues to walk hand-in-hand with his stepbrother, he will reach a dead end. It will be impossible to defend the fact that the residents of upscale Ramat Aviv Gimmel in Tel Aviv are building the right-wing settlement of Itamar Gimmel. It will be impossible to explain the situation in which the founders of the secular Alma College for Hebrew Culture are preventing the Women of the Wall from praying at the Western Wall. It will be impossible to understand why the secular Israeli center has become a servant of the religious right and the gravedigger of the Zionist dream.

Therefore, if Lapid doesn’t want to become a passing phenomenon, he must recognize that the alliance with Bennett was what is known as a “mekah ta’ut,” or a misguided transaction. It created a distorted political situation in which a relatively moderate Knesset gave rise to an extremist nationalist government. It created an unprecedented situation, in which control over many of the country’s resources has been transferred to the settlers. It has created a dangerous diplomatic paralysis for the nation. Enough, brothers, enough. The time has come to arrange a fair and friendly divorce between you.

Bennett’s Religious Services Ministry takeover portends change Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper
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Habayit Hayehudi’s assumption of the Religious Services Ministry must be viewed in the context of party chairman Naftali Bennett’s desire to effect a religious Zionist revolution. Will the ministry receive the radical changes it so desperately needs, or will it keep on providing jobs for political hacks while ineffectively serving the public?

The National Religious Party, a precursor of Habayit Hayehudi, was a kingmaker until losing that role to the ultra-Orthodox parties in the 1980s. Now it is returning to its roots.

A ministry for religious affairs was the aspiration of the Mizrahi movement − another ancestor of the NRP − to serve as the country’s provider of religious services while benefiting from jobs in local rabbinates and religious councils.

But in the mid-1980s − when the NRP and its offshoots began focusing on the settlements, and the more strictly observant Zionist rabbis began conceding to the ultra-Orthodox on religious and ideological issues − religious Zionism lost its ability to affect the state’s Jewish identity.

Bennett wants to regain that influence, one reason right-wing Zionist rabbis have been criticizing him in recent days. They fear, perhaps justifiably, that the heir to Zerach Warhaftig, Yosef Burg and Zevulun Hammer is searching for an alternative to the Haredim for everything linked to statism, the Chief Rabbinate, conversions, religious councils and the rabbinic courts.

The Religious Affairs Ministry, which was closed in 2003 with its responsibilities divided between the Prime Minister’s Office, the Education Ministry and the Justice Ministry, was revived by Ehud Olmert as the Religious Services Ministry four years later as part of a coalition agreement with Shas. Netanyahu extended the ministry’s reach further, and now he plans to extend it even further under his commitments to Habayit Hayehudi.

According to people in the negotiating teams, Habayit Hayehudi demanded two areas of authority that have not been returned to the ministry − responsibility for the rabbinic courts, which is still with the Justice Ministry, and responsibility for the yeshiva budgets, currently with the Education Ministry.

Women’s groups vehemently oppose removing the rabbinical courts from the Justice Ministry’s supervision. So it seems likely that only the yeshiva budgets will go back to the ministry. This request by Bennett was presumably related to the issue of getting more Haredim into the army, since under many proposals on drafting Haredim the main sanctions to be imposed if the community doesn’t meet draft quotas will involve yeshiva funding.

Eli Ben Dahan, who will apparently be named deputy minister with full responsibility for the ministry, has said he would consider adopting the Tzohar model for registering marriages and let couples register for marriage where they pleased. He also supports making city rabbis retire at 70.

At a recent panel of the Torah and Labor Faithful, which represents religious Zionism’s more moderate wing, Ben Dahan said he would back the right of every Jew to access community and religious services in accordance with his personal preferences, whether religious or secular. But he evaded the question of whether this would include services provided by Reform or Conservative bodies.

While Ben Dahan is considered a representative of the stricter religious-Zionist factions, criticism of him by the more right-wing rabbis shows they aren’t sure about him, especially after he supported Bennett in his moves against the Haredim. More liberal elements are optimistic about him, however.

“He had a very successful record as the rabbinical courts administrator,” notes Hadar Lifschitz, a lecturer at Ashkelon Academic College and a member of the Torah and Labor Faithful. “He comes from within and knows the system. There’s reason for hope