Blamelessly, convict bribery and tax evader Aryeh Deri has responded to the Supreme Court’s unsurprising finding that his return to ministerial post was “extremely unreasonable” by portraying the ruling as a dishonestly motivated attack on the “grand revolution” his Shas party promoted has. And by promising to evade by any means the court’s efforts to protect Israel and its coffers from its services.
Hours after Wednesday’s decision that he must resign immediately or be fired, and after inviting Benjamin Netanyahu to a solidarity and strategy session that also presented a joint taunting message of defiance to the judiciary, the prime minister is hell bent on the Castration, Deri declared: “We will continue the great revolution. We will continue to represent the poorer classes, we will continue to represent the Torah world, we will continue to protect the Jewish identity of the State of Israel by any means and by any means possible.”
“If they shut the door on us, we’ll get in through the window,” he swore with his revolutionary zeal. “If they close the window, with God’s help, we’ll break through the ceiling.”
Empowered by Netanyahu, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox leadership in the Sephardi Shas and its Ashkenazi counterpart, United Torah Judaism, have indeed long been embroiled in revolution. I am not talking about the disastrous planned judicial overhaul, but about an educational, social and economic revolution with devastating consequences for many of their own constituents and for Israel.
And the deals Shas and UTJ made in the coalition deals with Netanyahu’s Likud last month are designed to hasten the damage. If implemented, they are guaranteed to deepen the Haredi community’s education and labor crises, condemn much of the country’s fastest-growing demographic segment to further snowball poverty, and ultimately threaten the very existence of the state.
Get the daily Times of Israel by email and never miss our headlines again
By registering you agree to the terms
abuse of their constituency
In their coalition agreements, Shas and UTJ negotiated massively expanded funding for their non-government school networks. Not only are the finances and operations of such schools often not effectively overseen, leading to possible misuse of funds, but the additional funds must be allocated without an enforced obligation to teach a core curriculum including math, science and English.
Similarly, the parties secured increased funding for full-time yeshiva study for Haredi men and a pledge to expand the already broad exemption this sector of the population has received from the military and every other national service.
Combined, these priorities — portrayed as significant achievements by Deri and UTJ leader Yitzhak Goldknopf — mean more of her constituents are being denied the basic education they need to become an effective and fulfilling part of the workforce living in able to provide for their families and discourage them from even attempting to do so.
Instead – and this is exactly what Shas and UTJ’s strategy intends – many of them will become increasingly dependent on state-funded welfare and their political leaders using coalition leverage to keep that welfare going. However, it should be emphasized that Shas generally adheres to a more outspoken Zionist stance than the UTJ, and its constituents are far more likely than the UTJ to serve in the military and enter the workforce.
Yitzhak Goldknopf, leader of United Torah Judaism, arrives for a cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem January 15, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
No one understands better than Netanyahu the dangers to the Israeli economy posed by large sections of the population being undereducated and prevented from working. Just last month, in an English-language interview, Netanyahu explained in some of the most spectacularly self-assured comments imaginable how, as finance minister 20 years ago, he introduced sweeping reforms to the national welfare system that he says are sweeping across much of the Arab and Haredi communities have been abused.
“In order to put the ‘fat man’, the public sector, on a diet, I had to cut Israel’s wasteful welfare system, which encouraged people to live on unemployment benefits and not go out and work,” specified the prime minister. At the risk of becoming unpopular, he continued: “I cut child support, which was exceptional in Israel – it would increase with each additional child; it led to demographic and economic collapse. And the same thing happened in other sectors, the ultra-Orthodox community and so on. They didn’t work. They just had a lot of children that the private sector had to pay for.”
Barely three weeks after that interview, and just a week after he tweeted about it himself, Netanyahu’s Likud signed his coalition deals with the Haredi parties, calling for a return to the very same counterproductive processes he recognized and addressed 20 years ago.
Ultra-Orthodox men celebrate the Simchat Torah festival in the Mea She’arim neighborhood of Jerusalem on October 17, 2022. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)
national damage
Not only is it profoundly damaging to much of the Haredi community to face poor education, exclusion from national service, reduced prospects for productive employment and a disincentive to work, but it is also immensely damaging to the rest of Israel.
Inevitably, if your fastest-growing demographic sector receives an inferior education, your country will gradually deteriorate from a prosperous country to an inferior one. (The Haredi sector, currently about 12.6% of the population, is projected to grow twice as fast as the overall population. In fact, according to Dan Ben-David of the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research, an impressive 23.7% of Israelis have aged 0 -4 are Haredi.)
When large sections of this sector do not share the responsibility for national service, they withdraw from healthy integration with other Israelis, and this breeds resentment among those who shoulder the burden. If the rest of Israel has to increasingly subsidize them (20% of the workforce already pays 92% of income tax, while the bottom 50% of the population is too poor to pay income tax at all, according to Ben-David), resentment and only deepen the sense of injustice, with potentially drastic repercussions. These may include a growing brain drain, growing national disunity, a not-so-distant inability to sustain the strong economy, and ultimately, as a result, a reduced ability to provide Israel’s defenses.
The high birth rate, low level of education, widespread avoidance of national service, and relatively low labor force participation rates in much of the Haredi community are not new trends, and their impact is not a new cause for concern. But the coalition’s declared agenda will exacerbate them rather than address them.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leaves the Jerusalem home of Aryeh Deri after visiting the Shas leader hours after a Supreme Court ruling barring Deri from the ministerial post, January 18, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Supreme Court justices ruled Deri banned from serving as a minister, both because of his financial relapse and for misleading a Jerusalem magistrate’s court when he said, while hearing a non-custodial sentence on his tax conviction last year, that he had no more Will do business in matters of “public economic interest as it is distanced from the public”.
Indeed, the Shas leader’s “great revolution” will continue, to the terrible detriment of Deri’s own constituents and the state at large – whether he finds a window to get through or a ceiling to smash down to outflank them Direct court and ministerial.