Shortly before the original religious Zionist political movement turns 120, which will happen about a year from now, it is at risk of losing its Knesset representation. Recent polls tell us that only a minority of the national religious public still has any interest in the classic political home.
What began in 1902 as the Mizrahi Histadrut merged 55 years later with HaMIzrahi, and then turned into the National Religious Party and eventually Habayit Hayehudit (Jewish Home) is no longer viable political capital. It's doubtful that in the upcoming election it will be represented, even as an element of another right-wing party. Habayit Hayehudi leader Rafi Peretz, who resigned from Yamina, joined the Likud this week and announced he would be leaving politics, which could make him the one to turn out the lights on the sector's party, at least as an independent entity.
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After Peretz leaves, only the members of National Union-Tekuma, under MK Bezalel Smotrich – who also left the National Religious Party and is now a member of Yamina – will remain in the Knesset. They will only rejoin the crumbling Habayit Hayehudi brand if their negotiations with Yamina don't go well and the arrangement goes south.
Professor Asher Cohen, head of the School of Communication at Bar-Ilan University, one of Israel's most veteran researchers of religious Zionism and its politics, and pollster Menachem Lazar – head of the political desk at the Political Panels research institute – will soon be publishing joint article based on Lazar's doctoral thesis. The two describe the religious Zionist political parties of recent years as "an ineffective political system."
"From 1955-1977, when the National Religious Party was still a base camp, it consistently won 10-12 seats. When politics started to diversity from 1981-2009, when other parties appears that openly reached out to the national religious public – parties that presented themselves as alternatives to the NRP – it won six seats at the most," they write.
There were only two exceptions, Cohen tells Israel Hayom. "In 1996 and in 2006, years in which the national religious public united again as a political sector, because they felt threatened, with their backs to the wall. [In those years], the sectorial party won nine seats. The first time it happened was after [Yitzhak] Rabin's assassination, and the second time was after the disengagement [from the Gaza Strip]."
Who remembers the historical alliance?
Cohen underscores that the 12 seats Habayit Hayehudi won in 2013, under Naftali Bennett's leadership, "Are from another time, when Bennett and [Ayelet] Shaked turned the sectorial party into an open, more religiously diverse party. There was even a secular sector who voted for it then."
Cohen notes that in the 2013 election, "More than a third of Bennett's voters weren't part of 'religious Zionism.' Today, that is even clearer: of the 13 seats that the polls are now projecting for Bennett, only about one-fourth are religious Zionists. The current polls show us that if Smotrich resigns and runs independently, he won't make it past the minimum electoral threshold. Politically, the national republic public no longer behaves like a single sector. It has a number of options, particularly the Likud and Yamina."
In the past few elections, there were even some religious voters who cast ballots for Blue and White. Yair Ettinger, who recently published the book "Frumim" (Religious), defined the generation of religious Zionists that shapes the ineffectual political system that Cohen and Lazar studied as "the generation of individualization" of religious Zionism. Ettinger describes the disputes that are splitting the religious Zionist public, but mostly focuses on the broad spectrum of thinking along which the religious Zionist public is scattered: "Between conservatism and innovation … between national Haredim to religious liberals ... between conservation and progress." He describes the individualizing generation as "growing stronger, diversifying, radicalizing, moderating, splitting, sectorial, and non-sectorial," all in a framework of "more and more religious sub-groups."
Cohen suggests a wide-ranging explanation for the process of individualization. He goes back to insights from Professor Menachem Friedman, one of the preeminent researchers of the Haredi and religious word, who passed away some 10 months ago.
"Until 1977, the secular socialist movement in its various incarnations was seen by the national religious public as a threat and a danger. The moment the Likud under Menachem Begin appeared – a traditional prime minister who kept a kippa in his pocket, who was careful not to desecrate the Sabbath, who said 'Baruch Hashem' [Thank God] repeatedly, who unlike Mapai, did not keep religious Zionists away from the Education Ministry – was the moment the threat was lifted. That was the stage when many national religious people found a new home in the Likud. Many are still there today," he says.
Cohen thinks the religious Zionist vote is worth 12-15 seats and notes that this group is vanishing as a political entity nearly in parallel with the disappearance of the Labor party.
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"Two political movements with glorious pasts, which were founded at the start of the 20th century, and once had a 'historic alliance,' now need the mercy of God and help from other parties to survive in the Knesset," he says.
The seminaries are fine on their own
Perhaps the political failure of religious Zionism is actually a success. The story of religious Zionism has for years included an inherent paradox: the better it fulfills its stated goals of becoming part of mainstream Israeli society and even taking a lead role in major decisions for the country; the more it implements its ideology of mutual, anti-sectorial responsibility in a variety of fields – it effectively limits its own power as a political sector.
It appears that it is impossible to educate the national religious public to become an inseparable part of the leadership, academic, economic, legal, and media elite in Israel while also running as a sectorial political party. It seems that they cannot present a politically isolationist exterior while conducting themselves in a non-isolationist manner everywhere else.
In the outgoing Knesset, aside from 16 Haredi MKs and six Yamina MKs, there were 10 religious MKs from the Likud and six from Blue and White. Will the 24th Knesset, to be elected in March, look the same? In the election for the 21st Knesset, less than two years ago, the two parties that were competing for the national religious vote dropped the term "religious Zionist" from their names. The New Right and the United Right both emphasized the right-wing aspect rather than the religious aspect of their platforms and identities. The Haredi parties look up the banner of the Jewish sector.
Moreover, the religious Zionist parties are no longer the only ones who worry about funding religious education, yeshivas, and seminaries. Religious and traditional MKs from many parties are advocates for these educational institutions. When the reality looks like this, it's no wonder that individualization is picking up speed when it comes to the political strength of religious Zionism.
