Judaism Helped Netanyahu Triumph

One reason why Benjamin Netanyahu confounded the pollsters and squeaked to victory in Israel’s hotly contested presidential election last week might be found in the studios of pirate radio station Arutz 7 in this hilltop Jewish settlement.

On election day, this religious station lined up 2,000 volunteers with cars to taxi people to the polls. And given the philosophy of fervent Zionism and nationalism espoused by the station and its listeners, it is fairly safe to assume that most of the passengers cast votes for the leader of the right-wing Likud Party.

Beit El, a settlement north of Jerusalem peopled by observant Jews who believe that the Land of Israel has been divinely bestowed upon them, epitomizes a sector of Israeli society that proved to be Netanyahu’s secret weapon in his campaign against Prime Minister Shimon Peres of the Labor Party: the 25% or so of Israelis who can be classified as religious.

Especially in the closing days of the campaign, religious Jews provided much of the energy and the momentum for Netanyahu’s victory.

Spending from their own pockets, religious Jews traveled door to door across the country seeking votes for Netanyahu. They woke up early to seize strategic street corners and paper them with banners, posters and leaflets for “Bibi,” as Netanyahu is known. (One sticker put it bluntly: “Only Netanyahu. This is good for the Jews.”)

And on the decisive day itself, they voted with near-unanimity in their extended families in favor of Netanyahu.

Last-minute endorsements from leading rabbis like 106-year-old Yitzhak Kaduri left no doubt about whom the observant Jew should support as a religious duty.

“They have a sort of discipline,” said Daniel Sperber, a Talmud professor at Bar Ilan University, speaking of the ultra-Orthodox Jews known as the haredim, or “fearful of God.”

“When the rabbi told them to vote for Netanyahu, there was no question that within a few hours, you could marshal tens of thousands of people to vote as told,” he said.

In the words of former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, a Likud Party elder: “If there was one thing which decided these elections, it was the mobilization of this movement. . . . The Torah sages, the most prominent rabbis and the leading spiritual figures of the Jewish world understood the terrible danger we were facing.”

For religious Jews, the election became part of their larger struggle for the soul of Israel--whether the country is to be a normal secular democracy but with a large Jewish population, or whether it is to be a Jewish state governed to a significant degree by Judaic values and laws.

“They decided that the future of the country was at stake,” said Yedidya Atlas, a senior correspondent for Arutz 7, whose broadcasts are transmitted from a ship in the Mediterranean because it cannot get a license from the Israeli government.

“We were forced to make a clear choice on whether this was going to be the Jewish state of Israel that its founders envisioned--or some sort of binational or secular state.”

Although the final margin looked slim--Netanyahu winning by about 30,000 votes, or less than 1% of the ballots--among Jewish voters the victory for Netanyahu was unambiguous: 55.5% opted for Netanyahu compared with 44.5% for Peres.

Netanyahu was not outwardly pious until he began campaigning to become prime minister, but in his televised debate with Peres he twice invoked God’s blessing--and on the day before the vote, he prayed at the Western Wall, Judaism’s most sacred site. He also returned there to pray Friday shortly after his victory was confirmed; a religious supporter blew a ram’s horn in triumph.

Superficially, Netanyahu’s biography might have offended some believers. He is thrice-married, an admitted adulterer and the son of a secular Zionist family. How did the 46-year-old Netanyahu manage to capture the religious vote so completely? The answer seems to be that the religious vote was as much anti-Peres and anti-Labor as it was pro-Netanyahu.

Although most commentators analyzing the election have focused on security issues--saying that Peres’ supporters voted their hopes for the peace process rather than their fears of terrorism, and Netanyahu’s backers just the opposite--members of the religious community say that traditional values and the country’s “Jewish identity” were uppermost in their minds.

“The real debate here is not a political debate. The debate here is the outcome of a crisis about values,” said Rabbi Omer Fourmansky, who said he fears that changes in the country are undermining the country’s morality. The youth in public schools do not get enough exposure to the Torah, he said, and the mass media saturate them with messages of violence, drugs and other aspects of modern decadence.

Fourmansky accused Israeli state radio and television of being “almost completely ‘anti’ in [their] approach to religion” in recent years, even though religious and traditionally minded Jews constitute up to one-third of the population.

To religious voters, Labor’s willingness to compromise with the Palestinians in the peace negotiations, along with its candid appeals to Israel’s Arab minority to help keep it in office, was a scandal--a fundamental betrayal of the reason for a Jewish state.

The feeling was that the government had gone overboard on equality, “so much so that they began de-Judaizing Judaism and strengthening Arabism,” Sperber said. Some feared that Israel would eventually lose its Jewish character altogether.

“If this was just another democracy, I’d go back to America,” Beit El resident Shelley Nakonechny, who immigrated to Israel 25 years ago, said in a typical comment. “I came to live in a Jewish state.”

Another factor driving the religious vote was resentment of what many voters saw as the government’s bias against observant Jews. Some felt they were being blamed by the rest of society for last year’s assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by religious law student Yigal Amir.

Religious Jews felt “demonized,” Sperber said. “There was a feeling of a stigma to speaking openly about what they believed--they felt almost a shadow of Bolshevism invading their lives.”

Menachem Friedman, a sociologist, recently visited the haredim community of Bnei Brak and was struck by the depth of anger he found there toward Labor and Meretz, a liberal, secularist party that is Labor’s coalition partner and frequently jousts with religious leaders.

“They were saying the previous government humiliated them every day for the past four years, that it had become too much for them,” Friedman said. “They wanted to take revenge--meaning ‘Down with Peres’ and especially ‘Down with Meretz.’ ”

After Netanyahu’s victory, and significant gains by a trio of religious parties that will control 20% of the Knesset, or parliament, a feeling of relief and jubilation surged through the religious community--with a few notes of triumph mixed in.

This happiness was met with anxiety among secular Jews about what concessions the religious parties will be able to extract from Netanyahu, who is indebted to religious voters and needs the parties to form his government.

The priorities of religious Jews include closing down certain streets and halting bus service on the Sabbath, increasing government subsidies for housing for large Orthodox families, putting more religious content into the public school curriculum and, among the more nationalistic parts of the community, retaining and expanding settlements in the West Bank.

Such demands provoke concern among secular Jews, who, after all, remain the majority. They worry about being pelted with tomatoes or stones if they mistakenly stray into an Orthodox neighborhood in a car on Saturdays, or if they offend someone by wearing clothing that shows a midriff or too much thigh.

“What I am afraid of most is whether Netanyahu will continue the peace process or if he will be treating Palestinians as second-rate human beings,” said Shulamit Aloni, a Meretz member of Peres’ Cabinet much detested in the religious community. She believes the religious groups are at heart undemocratic and would lead Israel toward becoming an Iranian-style theocratic state.

Fourmansky said he expects the religious parties to be smart enough to move moderately and not try to force views on secular Jews in a manner that would “make themselves hated.”

“Everybody will see it is to the benefit of the world that Jews are running a Jewish state,” he said.