SHAS
- THE HAMAS OF ISRAEL
Is Civil War Also Possible
Among Israelis?
MER - 5/3/98:
They would hate the comparison of course. But Israel's
Shas party has many similarities to the Hamas movement within the Palestinian
community.
As the following article published in The Guardian
notes, an Israeli
civil war is no longer inconceivable. While such
a major historic turn
is far more likely among Palestinians, tensions
between religious and secular in Israel have also risen significantly in
the past generation.
And Shas is a crafty movement. As this Guardian article
notes, in order to play the contemporary political game Shas leaders are
working closely with the worst elements in Likud, Ariel Sharon among them,
pretending to be willing to possibly accept a "Palestinian State" when
in fact such a rump "State" would be little more than a "glorified Bantustan".
THE RISE OF THE TORAH'S GUARDIANS
David Sharrock in Jerusalem examines
how the party of ultra-Orthodox
Judaism is laying ever stronger
siege to Israeli secularism
The Guardian - April 30, 1998
Aryeh Deri can make or break any Israeli government.
Leader of the country's fastest growing party, the seemingly unstoppable
Shas, Mr Deri seems at the peak of his powers as Israel marks its 50th
birthday today.
His enemies claim that he is a threat to Israeli
democracy; his followers - the legions of Sephardi working-class Jews (from
Morocco and Middle Eastern countries) who have been pushed around by the
Ashkenazi elite (Jews of European origin) since the state's foundation
- worship him.
The phenomenal rise of Shas, founded in 1984 by Mr
Deri and a Sephardi spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, has been driven
by equal parts of politics and revivalist religion.
It is a "total movement" which caters to the social
needs of its marginalised constituency in much the same way as Hamas, the
militant Islamist organisation that supports violence against Israel, operates
among the Palestinians of Gaza.
Shas - an abbreviation of Guardians of Torah - has
built a national network of schools that provide an education to more than
80,000 children. Its summer camps, through which 50,000 pass every year,
are now being mimicked by left-leaning secular peace groups who are terrified
by the spreading influence of the ultra-Orthodox movement.
At the last general election, in 1996, Shas doubled
its vote to more than 250,000, gaining 10 seats in the Knesset. Most political
pundits reckon it will get at least 14 and and possibly 17 next time, consolidating
its place as Israel's third largest party after Labour and Likud.
Its electioneering techniques are controversial.
In 1996 its distribution of thousands of amulets bearing the likeness of
the 108-year-old kabbalist Rabbi Yitzhak Kedouri and the holy names of
angels was declared illegal by the state's central elections committee,
idolatrous by rival religious parties, and "a threat to democracy" by the
leftwing and secular Meretz party.
Now it seems that Mr Deri was successfully tapping
into the nation's Zeitgeist. The Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, secured
himself a blessing from the mystic Kedouri on the eve of polling day and
even the new Labour leader, Ehud Barak, is anxious nowadays to be granted
an audience - so far denied.
Every new poll shows the rising influence of the
ultra-religious community, which is characterised by its right-leaning
tendencies, the burden its mainly non-working males place on state coffers,
and its opposition to giving the Palestinians their own state alongside
Israel.
At a conference in Jerusalem this week Israel's leading
expert on the ultra-Orthodox, Menachem Friedman of Bar-Illan University,
pointed to the tension points around the country where secular people suddenly
find themselves next to religious neighbours.
A feud, for instance, in the town of Pardes Hanna,
is "an example of culture war, of how close we could be to civil war",
said Professor Friedman. "This is not an exaggeration. It is my fear that
the two sides cannot live side by side any more.
"Jerusalem has become Balkanised. The first question
a realtor is asked about a neighbourhood is whether it is religious or
secular.
"In the long run the ultra-Orthodox are in tremendous
danger because of their own birth rate. They have to get the government
to finance an enormous and rapidly growing infrastructure of yeshivas [religious
seminaries], apartments and social services.
"It is beginning to strain the government and it
is leaving the larger secular population feeling resentful, that it no
longer wants to carry them. This is a potentially explosive dynamic."
Mr Deri has been described by the centre-left newspaper
Ha'aretz as "a new kind of religious politician, not a narrow-visioned
powerbroker looking out solely for the interests of his own poor Sephardi
constituency but a more broad-minded, worldly figure, able to build bridges
to his secular counterparts".
A talk with the Shas leader at the party's smart
high-security headquarters in Jerusalem's "Gates of the City" skyscraper
failed to produce evidence for such optimism. The vast office reeking of
opulence - from the green suede furniture to the matches Mr Deri used to
light his pipe ("The Paris Ritz Hotel") - also seemed strikingly at odds
with the party's low-income grassroots.
He dismissed Prof Friedman's concern as "media hype".
"There's a minority on the left, and among the Haredim [the god-fearing],
which is trying to start a war but I believe and I'm optimistic that we
will continue to argue and that life will continue, because life is stronger
than any obstacle in its path," he said.
But he was vague on examples of what concessions
his party could make to the secular majority in order to reduce communal
tensions.
"Our struggle is that a Jew who wants to observe
the Sabbath should be able to," he said, in reference to the spats between
shop owners and Shabbat inspectors that are becoming a Saturday routine.
A "war", Mr Deri said, would start over the opposition
Labour Party's plan to draft the yeshiva system's Orthodox students into
the army to complete their military service alongside their secular teenage
counterparts. (Yeshiva students have been exempt since the state's foundation,
when they could be counted in handfuls: today thousands avoid military
khaki by dressing in Orthodox black).
"It's a very serious mistake... Students will go
to jail first and it will destroy the army," he said.
Mr Deri is embroiled in a complicated fraud trial
which stretches back years and seems to have no end in sight. A state comptroller's
report found that while serving at the interior ministry in the 1980s he
turned local government into a "pipeline" for the transfer of #15 million
to religious associations, many of them affiliated to his party.
His supporters say that Mr Deri was simply playing
by the usual unwritten rules of Israeli politics, or defend him by arguing
that it was high time the Sephardi community benefitted from "affirmative
action".
This week the party threatened to bring the government
down unless illegal religious radio stations supporting Shas are given
the same protection as a controversial rightwing settlers' station.
And there is no strong evidence that the party is
educating its voters to accept a viable Palestinian state as the price
of peace: Mr Deri's own map of vital Israeli interests in the occupied
West Bank seems to have much in common with that of the hawkish infrastructure
minister Ariel Sharon, which Palestinians and some leftwingers have dubbed
a glorified bantustan.
The only certainty is that Shas will play an even
greater role in the next 50 years of their country.
In the short term Mr Deri sees a second withdrawal
of Israeli troops from the West Bank very soon. "Then we will concentrate
all our efforts on negotiating a final settlement."
And the long term? "It's clear that there is no contradiction
between us being a Jewish and a democratic state. It is less Jewish than
I would prefer but only democracy determines if we will be more or less
Jewish. Politics is the means to achieving the option of living a religious
life.
"If you have no political power you won't receive
money from the government. I wish it were possible to separate religion
and politics, but especially in Israel, which is a Jewish country, you
cannot."
Guardian Media Group
www.MiddleEast.Org 