Israel Can’t Quite Separate Wheat From the Hassle

Politics, religion, the Middle East peace process and what some people suggest is just plain greed have become fused in a peculiarly Israeli way to produce a heated controversy involving, among others: farmers and bakers, the Labor and Likud political groupings, the ultra-Orthodox community, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Sounds complicated, right?

“Complicated is an understatement,” says an official at the Ministry of Finance, which has also been dragged into the affair, along with the ministries of trade and agriculture.

“And if you’re confused, you’re not the only one,” he adds. “Nobody can figure out what this is really all about.”

Maybe not, but a lot of people are getting pretty worked up over what is fast becoming known here as the great shmitta scandal of 5747.

Political tempers are rising and epithets are being hurled about with a gusto less suited to parliamentary discourse than a fraternity food fight. Not just the usual epithets like “hypocrite,” “demagogue,” and “liar.” No, this debate has already added a new term to the Israeli lexicon of political insults--”lobster guzzler.”

Simply put, this is what’s happened so far:

Israel’s small but assertive ultra-Orthodox community has gotten into a row with the Chief Rabbinate, the supreme religious authority in Israel, over the use of locally grown wheat during shmitta, a sabbatical year when, according to the Bible, Jewish farmers are supposed to let their lands lie fallow.

5747 by Hebrew Calendar

Sabbatical years fall once in every seven, and this year--5747 by the Hebrew calendar--is one of them.

During shmitta years, Jews are enjoined from either tending their land or eating the produce farmed from it. Long ago, however, people realized that strict observance of this biblical precept could spell economic disaster. So their rabbis found a loophole. They ruled, in a judgment applied to this day, that the land could still be tilled provided it was symbolically sold to a non-Jew for the duration of every shmitta year.

While the ultra-Orthodox have never accepted this fig-leaf solution, their numbers are small enough that their objections have always been easily accommodated--until now. Between what Arab farmers grew and what Israel imported, there was food of different origins to cater to everyone’s religious preferences.

Problem for Mills

Wheat posed a special problem since Israeli mills normally mix the 250,000 tons of grain that Israel grows annually with the 400,000 tons that it imports from the United States to meet its consumption requirements. However, even this problem was solved by allowing a few mills and bakeries to use only imported grain during shmitta years, while the rest continued to use the customary mix.

So why, many are asking, is this sabbatical year different from all other sabbatical years? This is where the situation has been complicated by coalition politics, religious rivalries, commercial motives and, in a strange way, even the Middle East peace process.

This year, the ultra-Orthodox, who have a lot more political clout today than they did seven years ago, have persuaded--some would say coerced--several of the largest mills in the country to refuse to use locally grown wheat.

Enlisting the support of Trade Minister Ariel Sharon, a member of the right-wing Likud Bloc, they have also approached the Department of Agriculture in Washington and secured its approval to buy an extra 200,000 tons of wheat from the United States this year to cover consumer needs if the local wheat is not used.

Deal Causes Uproar

When this deal was announced recently, with Sharon’s approval, it caused an uproar. Officials said it would cost Israel millions of dollars in unnecessary expenditures and could threaten the economic livelihood of Israeli farmers, who rely on the government to buy their wheat every year. While this shmitta year’s wheat crop has already been bought by the government, the Ministry of Finance has warned that it will not be able to buy next year’s wheat crop unless it can get rid of this year’s first.

Defensive Trade Ministry officials say the deal will not go through unless Israel can finance it by selling its own wheat crop on the international market. They add that, under a special arrangement reached with the Department of Agriculture, the extra U.S. wheat would be bought at a subsidized price of $80 per ton, which is about $40 below current market rates.

However, officials from the Ministry of Finance say that even with this discount, the transaction will end up costing Israel between $6 million and $7 million after shipping costs and other factors are added.

‘A Lot of Money for Us’

“We are easily talking about $7 million, which is a lot of money for us,” Finance Ministry spokesman Yitzhak Feinberg said.

The deal has upset people here for others reasons as well.

The Chief Rabbinate is in a huff because the pressure that ultra-Orthodox authorities brought to bear on the mill owners to use only imported wheat this year is seen as a challenge to its religious authority.

“What it boils down to is who is the rabbinical authority in the country. We think it’s clear that it is the Chief Rabbinate,” said Rabbi Yedidya Atlas, the rabbinate’s chief spokesman.

‘Such Nonsense’

“While it’s not up to us to decide which mill is going to take which type of wheat, our position is quite clear. We consider the selling of the land during the shmitta year to enable the Jewish farmer to work it to be completely valid. Therefore, to undermine the whole economy over such nonsense would be a terrible thing,” he added.

The dispute has also highlighted the tensions that exist here between secular Israelis and the ultra-Orthodox who, although they constitute only 5% of the population, flex a lot of political muscle, given the precarious balance of the “national unity” government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s Likud Bloc and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres’ Labor Alignment.

Because the two major blocs are evenly balanced in the Knesset, or Parliament, each has sought to curry favor with the small ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and Agudat Israel, whose support could become crucial should either side try to govern without the other.

Religion or Politics?

Indeed, the dispute is generally seen as having less to do with religion than politics because of the particularly uncertain future of the coalition government at the moment.

Blocked by Shamir from pursuing a Middle East peace initiative with Jordan, Peres has made it clear that he wants to dissolve the coalition and force early elections in the hopes of winning a mandate to continue the peace process on his own. While he has not yet been able to muster the 61 Knesset votes that he needs to call a new election, he is close enough that both Labor and Likud are stumbling over one another in their efforts to line up votes.

Sharon’s approval of the wheat deal is seen in this light. Defending himself in the Knesset against accusations that he had given in to ultra-Orthodox “blackmail,” he insisted that his decision was based on respect for religion, not on political calculations.

This explanation was greeted with general scorn and derision.

‘It’s a Farce’

“It’s a farce, it’s unbelievable, it’s insulting,” sputtered Knesset member Shulamit Aloni of the Citizens Rights Movement. “The haradeim (ultra-Orthodox) movement is playing politics, and whoever knows Ariel Sharon, with his hypocrisy and demagogic attitude, understands this.”

Editorials in the press were not as kind.

“Of all the trickster acts ever perpetrated on the Israeli political stage, and they have been legion, this one must have taken the kosher biscuit,” the Jerusalem Post thundered. “That one of the country’s most notorious lobster guzzlers should publicly rejoice in the growth of the number of those observing shmitta is worse than a bad joke. It is an obscenity.” The allusion is to Sharon’s alleged fondness for shellfish, which is strictly taboo under Jewish dietary laws.

Mills Also Assailed

Besides excoriating Sharon, the secularists also fault the mills that have sided with the ultra-Orthodox out of what most suspect are purely commercial considerations.

Because of governmental price supports for Israeli farmers, local wheat is a lot more expensive than imported wheat. If the mills buy only cheaper foreign wheat, profit margins will be greater when they sell flour to the bakeries, a Finance Ministry expert noted.

“They want that we should import more so they can buy cheaper,” he said.

How all this will end is not clear yet. The Cabinet held a meeting on it but could not reach a decision. Something will have to happen by the end of July, however, because that is when last year’s stores of local wheat run out and the shmitta harvest will have to be used--or sold to someone else.