My Two Cents Pt. 1

I am going to put all my personal issues to the side for now and give you my opinion on Israel's national sport, politics. This week, as you may know, Israel held its 5th election in less than 4 years.

You may also know that Bibi Netanyahu will be returning as prime minister. He will form a coalition with the two main Haredi parties, Shas and UTJ, and the far-right Religious Zionist Party (RZP).

This will give him a very comfortable 65 seats but still make him a hostage of his 3 partners, since if any leave, the government falls.

My thoughts.

Do you care?

You must because you are reading this.

First let’s discuss the Haredi parties.

All I can say is that they crushed it. For the last 4 elections the number of seats they have been getting was steady at 16. I have heard many times that this was not indicative of their real numbers. This election proves that. This time they won 21 seats. 17.5% of the total.

Wow

What does this mean?

To start, all the laws, recently passed that concerned the Haredi public, will be reversed.

No more need for math and science to be taught in haredi schools.

No more drafting for the army at a younger age

No more tax on plasticware, which although very good for the environment, is apparently  very bad for haredim.

They will also get several key ministerial positions ( actually deputy minister positions because taking the actual minister position would be too much of a recognition of state authority)

For example:

The ministry of the interior. One of its main functions is to determine who is Jewish. There is talk of amending the law of return because too many Ukrainian refugees are not halachically Jewish. No matter that the Nazi's would have killed them just the same, which was the purpose of the law to begin with. They will also want to turn back all the improvements to kosher certification and conversion. This was opened up to competition (for lack of a better word) and will now go back to the people with the most extreme religious views.

The new head of the Ashkenazi Haredi party (the old one had to leave politics to avoid jail for using his influence to help a pedophile evade justice for over a decade) wants to be in charge of the finance ministry. The last finance minister, whom I voted for, cut subsidies to married couples that only had one working parent. My guess is that this will be reversed within the first two months of the new government. Also, stipends for people with many children but no jobs will go up after being reduced.

But best of all, Haredi schools will not lose funding if they do not teach basic math, science, and civics. This was another law the last government passed. The best part of this is that this new leader, who wants to be in charge of the ministry of finance, recently said that learning math is a waste of time.

Why?

Because it doesn’t help anyone in their life.

I am not making that up. We may get a finance minister (deputy) who does not think math is important.

Next up RZP. I want to start by saying that although we will have a far right (some say extremist) party in the coalition, so does half of Europe. Although they received 14 seats, this is less than 12% of the vote. There are many European countries where this number is over 20%. In Italy and Hungry, the far right controls the government. This needs to be kept in mind when people start saying they won't deal with the new Israeli government. Are these same people not dealing with Italy (not to mention China, Iran etc.)? This is how Israel gets picked out as the WORST country in the world. It is just another excuse to hate Israel and Jews in general.

RZP ran on a racist, anti-immigrant anti-Arab, anti-democratic platform. I am truly shocked by some of our friends who voted for them and not shocked by others. RZP would like some juicy ministries as well. Itamar Ben Gvir, the number two on the list, would like to be minister of public security. This is a man who did not serve in the Israeli army because he was arrested over 30 times before he was 18 and they would not take him. This same man has pulled his gun out in Arab neighborhoods, as recently as last week, threatening to shoot people. One of the top officers in the police recently said that this was extremely, STUPID.

Another thing he wants to do is to change the law so that the supreme court cannot overturn a law passed by the Knesset.  No more checks and balances.

If that is not enough, he wants to change the laws concerning fraud and bribery of public officials and he will do everything in his power to make sure Bibi does not continue with his trials while he is prime minister.

I am just getting started.

In the next post I will discuss the Likud, my biggest political disappointment and who I voted for and why.