For several years now, parties representing the interests of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community have become increasingly central to Israeli politics. An electoral law that rewards smaller parties and some evident demographic trends – an ultra-Orthodox family has an average of seven children, who often tend to vote like their parents – have made these parties increasingly influential within the centre-right coalition, to which they have long belonged.
In the parliament elected in November, almost one in six parliamentarians was expressed by parties representing the ultra-Orthodox communities, i.e. communities that follow very strict rules of religious doctrine: they are political forces which, at the time of forming the government, obtained from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu several concessions. The new government’s first woe also revolved around a minister from the most influential of these parties, Shas, who was forced to resign after a highly contested Supreme Court decision by Netanyahu and his allies.
Although international newspapers often refer to Shas generically as an “ultra-Orthodox party” that belongs to the “ultra-Orthodox” coalition, in reality each party in this area has a particular and separate history.
Shas, for example, was founded in 1984 by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef to represent the interests of Sephardic Jews, i.e. of North African or Middle Eastern origins, who emigrated to Israel especially after the Second World War. Since the foundation of the Israeli state in 1948, the majority of the ruling class in politics, the army and public administration has instead been formed by Jews of Ashkenazi origin, in many cases fleeing the anti-Semitic persecution of the Nazis (and before that from the Russian one).
Sephardic and Ashkenazi are terms that refer to culture and certain religious practices, but especially to ethnicity. Ashkenazims came to Israel from Europe as early as the late 1800s and therefore look more like Europeans. The Sephardim instead moved to Israel in more recent times from North Africa and the Middle East, where they live predominantly Arabs, and therefore still today physically tend to resemble them. Both Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews can be non-religious, Orthodox, or ultra-Orthodox, thus following very strict rules of religious doctrine.
Shas was born as an ethnic party, rather than an ultra-Orthodox one (therefore representing a certain ethnic group rather than a certain religious orientation). Referring to Sephardi Jews, journalist Gal Gabai wrote in the book My Promised Land by Israeli intellectual Ari Shavit: «We Eastern Jews did not die in the Holocaust, we did not get killed in the War of Independence, we did not participate in the construction of the memory of the Holocaust, we were brought here and we were brought after all this (…) We had to prove every day that we were not Arabs».
On the perception of Sephardi Jews to be on the margins of Israeli society, Shas has built a remarkable populist rhetoric, both against the Ashkenazi elites and against the culture of a non-religious Judaism, such as the one promoted since the birth of the state of Israel by the Labor Party, which dominated Israeli politics until the 1980s. In the early days, however, the party gathered a rather transversal consensus throughout the Sephardic community. In the 1992 elections, his slogan was ‘neither right nor left’. Its best result was in the 1999 elections, when it won 17 out of 120 seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.
Then as now, the party secretary is Aryeh Deri, a charismatic rabbi of Moroccan origins who in recent years has shifted the party’s rhetoric and positions to the right, tying himself ever closer to Netanyahu. Until a Supreme Court ruling last week that found him incompatible with the post of minister due to a tax fraud conviction, Deri was Netanyahu’s deputy prime minister.
Aryeh Deri (Amir Cohen/Pool Photo via AP)
In recent years, Shas has increasingly targeted Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Sephardi Jews. For example by promoting more funding for religious schools for children and teenagers, the yeshivas, some of which are managed by the party itself.
Support for yeshivas – much criticized by secular Israelis, due to the fact that the teaching of subjects such as mathematics is subordinated to religious studies – is an important point of contact with the other parties representing ultra-Orthodox communities: for example with the United Torah Judaism party, which more specifically represents ultra-Orthodox Jews of Ashkenazi origin.
Born in 1992 from the merger of two smaller parties representing communities of ultra-Orthodox Jews who emigrated from Poland and Lithuania respectively, the United Torah Judaism party’s historical goal is to obtain as much funds and benefits as possible for yeshivas and more general for the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox community: therefore public housing, subsidies, exemptions from paying taxes and from military service. The latter in particular has become a deeply felt issue by the various ultra-Orthodox communities, given that several Supreme Court rulings have established the irregularity of the laws that exempt ultra-Orthodox youth from compulsory military service for all Israelis, after high school.
The parties that later merged into United Torah Judaism were explicitly “anti-Zionist”: not, however, in the sense of the term most used in the West, ie against the construction of an Israeli state; but in the sense that they held that a state of Israel should not be founded immediately, but only after the arrival on Earth of a Messiah, anticipated by the Bible. Today, most ultra-Orthodox have abandoned these positions, though not entirely.
A few weeks ago, a newspaper close to United Torah Judaism, Yated Neeman, for example, published an unsigned editorial in which he called the recent visit of the new Israeli Minister of Public Security, the extremist, “a dangerous and unnecessary provocation”. right-wing Itamar Ben-Gvir, at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, a place to which only Muslim faithful usually have access. Ben-Gvir belongs to the Jewish Power party, which in turn has supporters among ultra-Orthodox Jews, and can be considered a fervent nationalist and with strong Zionist positions: he would like an Israeli state that includes all the Palestinian territories. The visit to the Esplanade was judged too extremist by Yated Neeman, who instead expressed positions that we could define closer to the anti-Zionism described above.
United Torah Judaism leader Yitzhak Goldknopf (Menahem Kahana/Pool Photo via AP)
Then there are several parties that do not explicitly represent the interests of the ultra-Orthodox community, but have positions that link Israeli nationalism to religious Judaism, and for this reason they are attracting the votes of ultra-Orthodox voters disappointed by their own traditional references.
The most famous is the Religious Zionist Party, known informally as Tkuma. To date, Tkuma controls 7 seats in the Knesset. its leader is Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, an Orthodox Jew known for his very radical positions, who recently told a magazine for ultra-Orthodox: «The more the Israeli state promotes the study of the Bible, religious Judaism (… ) the more God will give us great abundance».
These parties have an explicitly Zionist and nationalist connotation, unlike United Torah Judaism and partly also Shas. This is the case of Jewish Power, considered by many to be the successor of Kach, an extremist movement founded by the American rabbi Meir Kahane who was outlawed in 1994 for his racist anti-Muslim positions and his repeated incitements to violence against Palestinians. Even today Kach is considered a terrorist organization by the European Union.
Potere Ebraico was founded ten years ago and until the last election it boasted an unenviable history of electoral defeats: despite standing in seven elections it managed to elect only one MP, Ben-Gvir, in the seventh attempt last year. However, this year he exceeded expectations and elected 6 parliamentarians to the Knesset after an electoral campaign aimed also and above all at ultra-Orthodox young people disappointed by the parties that normally represent their community.
