A Little Resentment as Secular Israel Quarantines and Religious Israel Gathers by the Thousands – Covid-19

“Massive Wedding Now in Jerusalem”

“To See and Not to Believe”

The above was a live video feed of a funeral in Israel from this afternoon, January 31, 2021 – in the middle of a pandemic. It was taken from a Facebook page, the link for which was sent to us.

There were more than 10,000 in attendance at this funeral. The government will not stop these events from happening because of the coalition Knesset and the power of the few ultra-religious ministers who hold the government hostage. The law enforcement will not step in because of the violence that ensues when when they try to prevent these events from happening.

This is an example of utter lawlessness.

In our opinion, these are large scale bio-terrorist events and should be treated as such. The leaders should be jailed. The people in attendance should be placed in a single location for two weeks so they cannot affect those people who have spent nearly a year abiding by the rules and were NOT in attendance. Medical attention should be denied to anyone who attended. There are law-abiding citizens who may need those beds.

This is wholly godless behavior. Doubtless more funerals will follow as others get sick, hospitalized and die. The end result is inevitable. The optics are terrible.

If there is Anti-Semitism, it is in this instance based upon a resentment and fear derived from actual and frightening events. This is nothing short of murderous conduct committed by a group of fundamentalist fanatics and endorsed by Israel’s government. Those in power in Israel have blood on their hands. There will be more.

To those religious and secular leaders who find this behavior reprehensible, we plead with you to step up and say something. We implore you to demand accountability. We ask that you protect the rest of us.

Gantz Political Consultant and the Israeli Rabbi and Others Who Allegedly Conspired to Tape Personal Matter

Tikun Olam תיקון עולם

From Tikun Olam

Israeli Rabbi Secretly Records Embarrassing Tape of Gantz Election Advisor

February 28, 2020 by Richard Silverstein

Though the incident which is the subject of this post is garden variety dirty tricks in the context of a typical Netanyahu election campaign, there are some larger issues of religious ethics which have important political implications.  Benny Gantz’s chief campaign consultant, Issac Bechar, asked for counseling from his rabbi, Guy Havura, about a personal family matter.  Unbeknownst to Bechar, Havura recorded their conversation and leaked it to Israeli media. Why?  Because the day before, Havura had welcomed Netanyahu and the latter’s lawyer into his yeshiva classroom, where he had blessed Netanyahu and exhorted his students to offer a prayer that the former would win 61 seats in the election and continue as prime minister.

 

Netanyahu Indicted – Fraud, Breach of Trust, Bribery

POLITICO Playbook PM: Trump’s man in Israel indicted on bribery and fraud charges

BREAKING IN ISRAEL — “Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu Indicted on Bribery, Fraud, Breach of Trust Charges,” by WSJ’s Felicia Schwartz in Tel Aviv: “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was indicted on bribery charges Thursday, imperiling the country’s longest-serving leader as he looks set to fight for his personal and political future in a third election contest.

“Israel’s Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit said Mr. Netanyahu will be charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust in connection to three corruption probes known as Cases 1000, 2000 and 4000. Mr. Netanyahu allegedly traded official favors for flattering news coverage as well as gifts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, including pink champagne, cigars and jewelry. The bribery charge, a key element of Case 4000, is the most serious and, if convicted, Mr. Netanyahu could face up to 10 years in prison. The lesser charges could result in three to five years in jail.” WSJ

— @jaketapper: “I’m sure this will alarm all of those who profess to be concerned about corruption abroad.”

NYT JERUSALEM BUREAU CHIEF DAVID HALBFINGER: “There were already signs of unrest in Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party, as a popular younger lawmaker, Gideon Saar, called Thursday for a primary contest for prime minister, and said he would be a contender.

“Even if Mr. Netanyahu fends off intraparty challengers, and assembles a viable coalition in Parliament, Mr. Plesner said that the Israeli president, Reuven Rivlin, might balk at assigning him the task of forming a government while he awaits trial. In addition, critics are expected to petition the Supreme Court to rule that Mr. Netanyahu must step down.” NYT

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“Religion ought to be a beautiful thing, not a political thing” – Israel and the Religious Hurting Judaism

[OPINION] – By David Suissa/JNS.org – reprinted in part without explicit permission

Israel’s Religious Parties Hurt Judaism

On the surface, the fact that Israel is headed back to an election only weeks after the last one looks like a system failure. It’s never happened before in Israel. The Israeli government will now have spent the bulk of a year in election mode rather than governing mode. There’s something wrong with this picture.

And yet, if we look at the reason for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to cobble together a coalition — one party’s refusal to kowtow to religious parties — this “do-over” election presents a unique opportunity for a political upgrade.

Israel’s religious parties crave political power because it enables them to fulfill their religious agenda, from refusing to enlist in the IDF to forcing Torah laws on the public. Over the years, because Netanyahu has desperately needed their seats to form a majority coalition, he has tolerated their demands.

He probably figured the same thing would happen this time around — but one man stopped him. Avigdor Lieberman, chairman of the right-wing secularist Yisrael Beiteinu party, decided he had had enough and refused to compromise on a bill to draft haredi(ultra-Orthodox) Jews into the IDF.

JUNE 7, 2019 11:08 AM

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Normally, Netanyahu is able to pull things together at the last minute, because Knesset members are loath to jeopardize their positions by going to new elections. In this case, it didn’t work. The religious parties threw a few bones of compromise, but Lieberman held firm, sticking to the original draft bill.

This dispute is rooted in the founding of the Jewish state, when Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion made the fateful decision to exempt ultra-Orthodox men (only a few hundred at the time) from enlisting in the IDF. A well-known modern Orthodox rabbi in Israel once told me that this decision did more to turn off secular Jews to religion than anything else.

This makes sense. If you’re an Israeli parent whose children are risking their lives to defend the state, why should ultra-Orthodox citizens be exempt? And if you see ultra-Orthodox leaders fighting to keep their community out of the army, how would that make you feel about religion in general?

There are countless other ways that political power in the hands of ultra-Orthodox parties has become corrosive.

 

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Did Netanyahu Agree to Gender Segregation in Public – Selling his Soul to the Ultra-Orthodox Minority

PM agreed to ultra-Orthodox demand for gender-segregation in public — report

Netanyahu reportedly agreed to an ultra-Orthodox demand for gender segregation in public places during the coalition negotiations last month, the Kan public broadcaster reports.

According to the report, Netanyahu sought to soften the demand in his talks with his would-be coalition members, but ultimately agreed to the condition laid out by Shas, United Torah Judaism, and the Union of Right Wing parties.

The Likud denies the report, telling Kan that no such agreement was made.

From the Times of Israel

The Ultra-Orthodox Free-Loaders in Israel Posing Existential Threat to Israel and to Jews

• 

New Israeli election highlights tense ties to ultra-Orthodox

 

JERUSALEM (AP) — The trigger for Israel’s unprecedented repeat election touches upon one of the major fault lines in Israeli society — the role of the growing ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in modern life.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s prospective government collapsed last week over the issue of military draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men, a source of longtime resentment among the secular majority of Jewish Israelis who are required to serve.

The conflict over the draft law is just one of several deep disagreements over the role of religion in Israeli society. While the ultra-Orthodox parties wield significant political influence, experts say their cloistered communities are being left behind by modern society, with long-lasting negative consequences for the future of the country.

After appearing to win April 9 elections, Netanyahu was blocked from forming a governing coalition by his political ally turned rival Avigdor Lieberman, who insisted on passing legislation that would require young ultra-Orthodox men to be drafted into the military like everyone else.

Not only did Lieberman’s nationalist, yet secular, Yisrael Beiteinu party deny Netanyahu the chance to form his fifth government, it also all but guaranteed the issue will feature prominently in the upcoming campaign.

“I have nothing against the ultra-Orthodox community, and I think they should integrate,” Lieberman said after the new vote was called. However, he added: “You can’t have a government that is dictated to by one group alone.”

Lieberman has seen his core constituency of aging immigrants from the former Soviet Union shrink and has clearly identified secular rights as a winning campaign strategy. Though he has cut deals with the ultra-Orthodox in the past, he seems poised to run on a ticket that will oppose what he calls the “complete surrender of (Netanyahu’s) Likud to the ultra-Orthodox.”

While the Israeli political spectrum is often defined over where politicians stand on matters of Palestinian statehood, the internal divide is just as profound on matters of religion, and in particular the ultra-Orthodox parties’ status as political kingmakers in Israel’s fragmented parliamentary system.

The ultra-Orthodox have leveraged their clout over the decades to maintain a segregated lifestyle. They run a separate network of schools, raise large families on taxpayer-funded handouts and enforce a public status quo — such as preventing most commerce and public transportation on the Sabbath — that has enraged the secular majority. The ultra-Orthodox also wield a monopoly over matters of marriage, burials and conversions.

But in a country where Jewish males must typically serve three years in the army, the sweeping military draft exemptions have done the most to feed the visceral culture war.

“Giving one’s life for one’s country is the ultimate sacrifice. It is unconscionable that there are free-riders in Israel who have the gall to treat the rest of us as lower caste mercenaries to ensure their livelihood,” said Dan Ben-David, a Tel Aviv University economist and president of the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research, who has researched trends in the community.

He said the draft is “symptomatic” of something much bigger. “They ostensibly prefer not to enter modern society, but have no compunction about claiming its fruits, from modern health care through modern infrastructure to the extensive subsidization of their lifestyle,” he said.

The draft exemptions go back to Israel’s establishment in 1948, when the government allowed several hundred gifted students to pursue religious studies.

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Israel Headed Toward Political Meltdown as Shasniks Refuse to Submit to Mandatory IDF Service Like all Israelis

The New York Times

With 2 Days Left, Israel’s Netanyahu Struggles to Form a Government

 

By Isabel Kershner

• May 27, 2019

JERUSALEM — With just two days left before the deadline for forming a government, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel was struggling Monday to sign up coalition partners, thrusting the country into a political crisis and raising the possibility that it could be forced to hold a new election.

The drama stemmed from a battle of wills between two political forces that Mr. Netanyahu needs to form a right-wing coalition: the ultra-Orthodox religious parties that won 16 parliamentary seats in the April 9 election, and Avigdor Lieberman’s ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, which won five seats and whose constituents are mostly secular, Russian-speaking Israelis.

Having long sparred over issues of religion and state, the sides are now wrestling over legislation to replace a military draft law that exempted ultra-Orthodox men. Mr. Lieberman supports a law that sets modest quotas for enlisting them, which the religious parties oppose.

A new law must be passed by late July, according to a deadline imposed by Israel’s Supreme Court.

Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party, which won 35 seats, needs the ultra-Orthodox parties, Yisrael Beiteinu and two other parties to assemble a 61-seat majority.

Analysts said it was entirely possible that the parties could resolve their differences, allowing Mr. Netanyahu to announce a new government by midnight Wednesday, which would not be the first time Israeli coalition negotiations have gone to the wire.

But the alternative threatened to catapult Israel into uncharted political terrain: Israel has never had to hold a new national ballot because of a failure to form a government after an election.

“Right now it looks as if we are at a deadlock because everybody has climbed to the top of a tree and nobody’s ready to get down, especially not Lieberman,” said Abraham Diskin, professor emeritus of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Putting the chances of a new election at 50-50, he added, “Definitely there is a possibility that we will have early elections even before the government was formed.”

On Sunday, Likud submitted a motion to disperse the newly sworn-in Parliament, paving the way for new elections. While questions arose over the legality of an interim government taking such action, the move seemed like a canny negotiating tactic in a game of political chicken.

By Monday, one newspaper, Maariv, had already published a poll asking, “If elections were held today, who would you vote for?”

On Monday evening, the motion passed a preliminary vote in Parliament; possible dates were being bandied about for a new election in about three months.

Even as his party moved toward a new election, Mr. Netanyahu insisted he didn’t want one.

“It is still possible to come to our senses,” he said in a televised address Monday evening. “I promise that I will continue to work in every possible way during the time that is still left in order to form the government. I call upon Avigdor Lieberman to reconsider.”

Mr. Netanyahu also quoted a tweet posted on Monday by President Trump endorsing Mr. Netanyahu’s efforts, which many critics described as an improper intervention in Israel’s domestic politics. Mr. Trump, calling Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname, Bibi, wrote: “Hoping things will work out with Israel’s coalition formation and Bibi and I can continue to make the alliance between America and Israel stronger than ever.”

Calling a new election would pre-empt another possibility, distasteful to Mr. Netanyahu, that Israel’s president, Reuven Rivlin, could offer someone else the chance to form a government.

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Avigdor Lieberman, the former defense minister, said he was not prepared to be part of a government controlled by religious law.CreditDan Balilty for The New York Times

The opposition is led by Blue and White, a new centrist party whose main appeal was that it was not led by Mr. Netanyahu, who has already served 13 years as prime minister and is facing indictment on corruption charges.

Mr. Netanyahu, who is on track to become Israel’s longest serving prime minister this summer, is also the first to face possible criminal charges while in office. In February, the attorney general announced plans to indict him in three cases for bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

The attorney general has set a hearing for October where Mr. Netanyahu’s lawyers can plead his case before a final decision is made.

The Likud nevertheless won five more seats than last time, which Mr. Netanyahu took as a vote of confidence, and together with the right-wing and religious parties that made up his last coalition, seemed poised to form a government with a majority of 65 seats.

He also appeared set to take on another challenge — promoting legislation that would guarantee him immunity from prosecution while in office. Tens of thousands of Israelis rallied in Tel Aviv on Saturday night in a protest against such a move.

Instead, Mr. Netanyahu has found himself at the mercy of smaller parties engaged in a power struggle over the military draft law, which critics said was in any case a mild compromise unlikely to significantly change the status quo.

There is a long history of bad blood between Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Lieberman, a blunt, tough-talking politician who resigned as defense minister in Mr. Netanyahu’s last government and was eyeing returning to the post.

Some commentators suggested that Mr. Lieberman was driven by a desire for revenge against his old nemesis, or was counting on the prospect that Mr. Netanyahu could not survive an indictment and was setting himself up as an alternative.

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