Without any shame, convicted bribery and tax offender Aryeh Deri has responded to the High Court’s surprising determination that his return to ministerial office be justified by portraying the ruling as a foul-mouthed attack on his ruling party’s “Great Revolution”. is “unfair in the extreme”. has been nurturing. and by promising, by any and every means, to avoid the court’s attempt to protect Israel and its treasury from its ministrations.
wednesday a few hours later ruling Derry announced that he must immediately step down or be fired, and hosted Benjamin Netanyahu for a solidarity and strategy session, which also delivered a joint sarcastic message of defiance to hell with the Prime Minister, Derry Declared: “We will continue” the Great Revolution. We will continue to represent the poorer sections, we will continue to represent the world of the Torah, we will continue to defend Israel’s Jewish identity by all means and by all means.
“When they close the door on us, we’ll get in through the window,” he said. swore off With his revolutionary fervor. “When they close the window, with God’s help we will break through the roof.”
Empowered by Netanyahu, Israel’s ultra-Orthodox leadership in the Sephardi Shas and its Ashkenazi counterpart United Torah Judaism has in fact been engaged in a revolution for a long time. It is not the disastrous planned judicial reform I am talking about here, but an educational, social and economic revolution that has disastrous consequences for its own electorate and for Israel.
And the agreements Shas and UTJ struck in last month’s coalition deals with Netanyahu’s Likud are designed to accelerate losses. If indeed implemented, they are guaranteed to deepen the Haredi community’s education and work crisis, pushing the country’s fastest-growing population segment further into poverty, and ultimately the stability of the state. puts in danger.
misusing your constituency
In their coalition agreement, Shas and UTJ negotiated largely expanded funding for their non-state school networks. Not only are the finances and operations of such schools often devoid of effective oversight, resulting in the potential for misuse of funds, but additional funds are allocated to teach a core curriculum including maths, science and English.
Likewise, the parties pledged to increase funding for full-time yeshiva study for Haredi males, and to widen the already extensive exemptions that segment of the population has received from the military and any other national service.
In combination, these priorities – presented as significant achievements by Derry and UTJ leader Yitzhak Goldkopf – mean that more of their constituents are denied the basic education that would leave them with a workforce capable of providing for their families. necessary to be an effective and complete part. , and a disincentive for them to even attempt to do so.
Instead – and this is the intention of the Shas and UTJ strategy – many of them will become increasingly dependent on state-funded welfare, and use coalition leverage over their political leaders to keep that welfare funding on flow. Shas, it should be emphasized, however, generally holds a more explicitly Zionist outlook than the UTJ, and its voters are more likely than the UTJ to have served in the military and entered the workforce.
Housing and Construction Minister Yitzhak Goldkopf, leader of United Torah Judaism, arrives for a cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem, January 15, 2023. (Jonathan Sindel/Flash90)
No one recognizes the threat to Israel’s economy from a massive population with a subpar education, and discouraged from working, more than Netanyahu. Just last month, in some of the most brilliantly un-self-aware comments it’s possible to conceive, Netanyahu explained in an English-language precision interview how, as finance minister 20 years ago, he introduced sweeping reforms to the national welfare system, which he said was widely abused in Arab and Haredi communities.
“To put the fat man, the ‘public sector,’ on a diet, I had to reduce Israel’s lavish welfare system, which encouraged people to live on the dole and not go out and work,” the prime minister Specified, At the risk of being unpopular, he added, “I cut child allowances, which were extraordinary in Israel – they would increase with each child; it was leading to demographic and economic collapse. And the same thing is happening in other regions.” ultra-Orthodox communities, etc. They didn’t work. They had a lot of kids that the private sector had to pay for.
Barely three weeks after that interview, and just a week after tweeting about it himself, Netanyahu’s Likud signed its coalition agreements with the Haredi parties, which provided for a return to the same adversarial procedures they had followed in the 20s. Identified and dealt with 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 loss
Not only is it extremely harmful for the Haredi community to suffer low education, exclusion from national service, diminished prospects for productive employment, and discouragement from trying to work, but it is also extremely harmful for the rest of Israel. .
When your fastest growing demographic is given a poor education, your country slowly, inevitably, goes from a successful country to a bad country. (currently making up about 12.6% of the population, the Hardy region is called Increasing Twice as fast as the total population. really, According According to Dan Ben-David of the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research, 23.7% of Israelis aged 0–4 are Haredi.)
When large sections of that territory do not share the responsibilities of national service, they withdraw from a healthy integration with other Israelis, and this creates resentment among those taking the strain. when the rest of Israel also needs to subsidize them increasingly (20% of the workforce already pay 92% income tax, while the bottom 50% of the population is too poor to pay any income tax, According Ben-David), feelings of resentment and injustice can run deep, with potentially harsh consequences. These may include a growing talent drain, widespread national disunity, a far greater inability to maintain a strong economy, and ultimately, by extension, a diminished ability to ensure Israel’s defense.
High birth rates, low education, mass avoidance of national service, and relatively low workforce participation by much of the Haredi community are not recent trends, and their implications are not new sources of concern. But the announced agenda of the alliance will exacerbate rather than address them.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leaves the Jerusalem home of Arya Derri, hours after a High Court ruling disqualifying Derri from ministerial office, on January 18, 2023, after meeting with the ruling leader. (Jonathan Sindel/Flash90)
High Court judges ruled that Derry should not hold ministerial office because of his financial misconduct and for misleading a Jerusalem magistrate’s court when negotiating a non-custodial sentence. sentence to his tax conviction last year, that he “would no longer deal with matters of public economic interest as they would be removed from the public domain.”
Indeed, to the terrible loss of Derry’s own electorate and the wider state, the Shas leader’s “great revolution” will go on – whether or not he finds a window to come through, or a roof to break through, so that he can get through. . The courts and ministers direct it.