Benyamin Netanyahu had announced that he would be holding snap elections in the fall, which would was assumed to give the Likud a better electoral position.
Then, he announced that there would be no election, because he had formed a coalition with the 2nd place party, Kadima.
For Kadima, which looked to be destroyed in a future election, dropping to 4th or 5th place, it made sense, but it didn’t appear to make sense either Netanyahu or Likud.
I kind of shrugged, and put it off to the rather Byzantine nature of Israeli electoral politics, but Harvard’s Noah Feldman appears to have an explanation, and, in what might be a first for Benyamin Netanhahu, it appears that he reshuffled the coalition in order to make a deep and fundimantal change in Israel’s society, and the only reason that we would make that change is because he thinks that it was the right thing.
If this calculus is true, I agree with him:
Israel’s newly expanded governing coalition may be more cautious about bombing Iran, and it may be marginally more open to serious negotiations with the Palestinians. But neither issue was the immediate reason the centrist Kadima party joined the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on May 8.
The fundamental issue was the relationship between Israel’s secular and ultra-Orthodox populations.
A looming crisis in Israeli politics was created when the country’s highest court ruled in February that ultra-Orthodox men studying in Israeli yeshivas, academies of higher Talmudic learning, must be drafted into the Israeli army as of Aug. 1. Since Israel was founded in 1948, ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students have been exempt from compulsory military service, as have religious Jewish women and Palestinian Arabs who hold Israeli citizenship. Those exempt can choose nonmilitary national service, but few do.
The exemption was the product of a deal between David Ben- Gurion, Israel’s legendary first prime minister, and the ultra- Orthodox minority, which was then tiny. At the time, many ultra- Orthodox Jews in Israel and abroad rejected the very idea of a Jewish state, believing that only God had the authority to re- create Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel. To hasten the messianic age was a sin, and secular Zionism was its incarnation.
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The latest round of coalition building may have broken that cycle. [Of having to kowtow to small religious parties to maintain the coalition] Netanyahu feared that passing a new law to address the high court’s ruling might bring down his government, and had called early elections to avoid the conflict. He canceled that plan two days later, however, after expanding his government. With 94 of the 120 seats in parliament, the new government can address the ruling without fear of collapsing because of defections. The centrist and secular Kadima, led by former military chief of staff Shaul Mofaz, is likely to see eye to eye with Netanyahu’s Likud party on this issue.
If these maneuvers are intended to change this policy, then it is an unalloyed good.
The idea that Yeshiva Bochers are to be exempted from the basic requirements of citizenship is wrong.
Furthermore mandatory service (largely military, though the Orthodox might end up working in public service) has the effect of exposing members of this community to the rest of society in a day-to-day professional environment.
Should this new policy come into effect, it will have a major impact on the coming generations of Heredim.
One hopes that this will also result in more of them working for a living, as opposed to sponging off subsidies from the government, which is good both from a societal and halachic (religious law) perspective.
The sages clearly state that, “Torah is not a spade,” meaning that religious scholarship should not be an excuse not to support one’s self and family.
This is the first time since the 1950s that a 