Religious Alliances Helped Netanyahu Win

It was like a tent-meeting revival--Israeli-style.

A crowd of plainly dressed men and women crowded into a large hall, stood up and publicly pledged their vote to the “holy Shas Party, and were blessed by a charismatic rabbi who promised them long life, health and marital bliss.

That kind of “down home” Judaism may have been one of the biggest factors in the upset election victory of right-wing Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu last week.

Although Israel’s recent election was billed to the outside world as a referendum on the Arab-Israeli peace process, many Israelis saw the vote as a crossroads on another, equally divisive issue--the religious identity of the 48-year-old Jewish state.

Although Netanyahu is a secular politician, he forged a potent alliance with a series of small religious parties that endorsed his candidacy for prime minister in return for his promises of power in the Cabinet of the future government.

The religious parties, it turned out, commanded much more popular support than anyone had predicted, a following that helped hand Netanyahu his narrow 50.5%-49.5% victory.

The post-election picture that has emerged is one of a nation deeply split between the staunchly secular philosophy of Israel’s left-wing leaders, who pioneered negotiations with the PLO, and the religious orthodoxy of Netanyahu’s new allies, who believe their first mission is to restore Judaism to Israel, rather than to integrate into the Arab world.

The ultimate vote expressed the alienation of many Israelis, particularly those of Middle Eastern origins, from Peres’ vision of a secular Israeli state assimilated into a “New Middle East.”

“[Voters] don’t want to be the Paris of the Middle East,” said liberal Orthodox rabbi David Hartman. “They don’t want secularization.”

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Netanyahu talked a populist language of Jewish roots and legacy. He sought an election-eve blessing from a mystical Rabbi Yitzhak Kadouri and peppered his victory speech with biblical passages.

Simmering ethnic tensions, which many Israelis believed had disappeared, also surfaced in the fateful vote. Sephardic or Middle Eastern-born Jews, who tend to be more traditional and clustered in lower-income groups, voted overwhelmingly for Netanyahu as prime minister, and they supported religious parties like Shas in a separate parliamentary race.

European-born Jews and Israeli-Arabs, on the other hand, voted for Peres in tandem with the secular Labor and leftist parliamentary candidates.

When Sephardi religious party leaders distributed blessings and amulets to their political followers, such tactics were denounced by secular left-wing politicians as “voodoo” politics.

Still, the campaign of mystics and healers, blessings and amulets, struck a powerful chord among deeply traditional Middle Eastern Jews--who also resented the condescending remarks of liberal critics.

“There is a folk religion in the Sephardic community which touches on very deeply felt emotions about the holy man, and blessings and curses emanating from him,” said Hartman. “Rationalism has not uprooted those sentiments. People still live as very vulnerable human beings, susceptible to these mystical powers.

“The left loves to see this in order to make fun of it. But they don’t offer any kind of alternative Judaism, which would give a Jewish [spiritual] dimension to this society, but would have respect for human rights, pluralism, and freedom of conscience.”

Similarly, on social and economic issues the left-wing parties were perceived by many Israelis as elitist groups, which drew the bulk of their support from the business community and the upscale suburbs of Tel Aviv.

In contrast, the religious and right-wing parties were anchored in poor towns and neighborhoods that missed out on the economic boom of the peace era--a boom that saw the gap between Israel’s rich and poor widen into a chasm larger than in almost any other country in the developed world.

While the rich have reaped the economic benefits of peace in the form of new international trade and business ties, the religious parties have taken it upon themselves to care for the poor and bolster their dignity, said Israeli commentator Iris Mizrachi.

While the rich lit candles at peace rallies, religious groups like Shas were providing subsidized day care to preschoolers, hot meals to the elderly and aid to drug addicts, she said.

“Without a doubt, the great demise of the government was its complete disregard for a third and fourth generation of poverty,” Mizrachi said. “When you rob a man of his dignity and he lives on the poverty line, he turns to the only power that can restore at least his honor--he turns to God.”

Now, with the largest proportion ever of religious members in Israel’s incoming parliament--or Knesset--Israelis are trying to figure out how the new right-wing religious alliance will affect their daily lives.

Many of the poor and traditionally religious expect to see Netanyahu reward religious party leaders with appointments as ministers of housing, welfare, education and religion--wielding billions of dollars in government budgets.

Those appointments mean that more money will be pumped into informal systems of low-cost housing, subsidized educational programs, welfare and religious study controlled and operated by the religious parties. Religious nationalist Jewish settlers living in the West Bank, meanwhile, also are hopeful that a four-year government freeze on the expansion of settlements will end.

In the legislative arena, meanwhile, religious political leaders are now signaling that they may use their new political power to push through new laws that would curb abortion, increase religious education in the state school system and preserve the monopoly of the Orthodox religious establishment on “personal status” issues such as marriage and divorce.

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The scenario is particularly worrisome to non-Orthodox groups such as Israel’s Union for Progressive Judaism, which has fought hard to win limited government recognition for non-Orthodox conversion, marriage and burial over the past four years.

“We are talking about massive allocations to all sorts of Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox religious institutions, discrimination against Christians, against non-Jews and Jews who are non-Orthodox,” says Anat Galili, a spokeswoman for the movement.

“We opened up the teaching of religion and Bible in the public schools to a more pluralistic approach. . . . I pray the new government won’t retreat backwards. But I’m not 100% sure,” said Yehoshua Amishav, a spokesman for the Education Ministry.

Yitzhak Rath, a spokesman for the National Religious Party, one of the Orthodox groups that won a large parliamentary representation, says the fears represent an attempt to “demonize” religious parties by the secular public.

“What happened was a vote of the public,” Rath said, “which decided that it prefers children to grow up with a little Jewish culture, rather than the Canaanite [pagan] culture that was represented by the left.”