Whether or not last week's Supreme Court decision regarding Aryeh Deri's legal right to serve as a minister in cabinet is right, Deri should have resigned immediately and now that he is out of the government, stay home permanently. His ruinous record in politics is without peer.
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The Shas leader Deri is an extreme expression of pugnacious Haredi power; a super-self-confident politician who bulldozes overall legal, civic, and moral boundaries to "bolster" (read: enfeeble) his Haredi voting public. His brand of blithely sectorial, brusquely cynical politics has been catastrophic.
Deri was one of the father-figures of the Haredi world of dependency, of living off the dole. He was central to the creation of the all-encompassing government-support system for those studying in yeshiva; a system so comprehensive that it simply does not pay for a kollel student to step out into the working world.
He has never spoken positively about the higher education and professional training programs for ultra-Orthodox men and women that have opened in recent years, nor has he said one word about the importance of increased participation of Haredi men in the army.
Deri also is directly culpable for turning Rabbi Ovadia Yosef of blessed memory away from his earlier path of religious and political moderation.
Deri also was behind the infamous, racist "Kochavit Giyur" ("Dial-a-Conversion") advertising campaign that Shas ran several election campaigns ago. This campaign smeared Russian olim as counterfeit converts, and slandered Religious Zionist rabbis as liberal destroyers of conversion standards.
Deri spawned the failed "stinking maneuver" in 1990 that brought down the unity government led by then-Prime Minister Shamir and attempted to install a narrow Shimon Peres-led government instead. Then, Deri purchased the Labor Party's support for Haredi takeover of state religious enterprises (such as the Chief Rabbinate and religious courts) by backing the Oslo process – until Palestinian terrorism made it too difficult for Shas voters to stomach this.
Deri will cut a deal with anyone of any background to get his candidate elected if it serves his momentary purpose – such as getting Moshe Lion elected as mayor Jerusalem. Deri collaborated with the oh-so-very-treif, staunchly anti-religious Russian party boss Avigdor Lieberman for this purpose, defeating the upstanding Nir Barkat. (Lion has become an excellent mayor, but that is beside the point.)
The fact that Deri has been caught in criminal violations more than once and gone to jail has not stopped him. He brushes this off by presenting himself as a persecuted man whose concern for the poor will bring salvation to the downtrodden of Israel.
He seditiously plays the ethnic card, with him being discriminated against as a "franck" (a poor, marginalized Sephardic Jew), this week again too. He has no problem cynically inflaming ethnic tensions in this way, even though it is of course ridiculous for Deri to claim marginalization. If anybody has been in the privileged political driver's seat for the past 25 years, as opposed to being victimized, it is Arye Deri.
More recently, Deri led and defended the Haredi community's separatist and defiant response to the government's coronavirus restrictions, fiercely objecting in cabinet to application of the "red light" system of differential lockdowns. This, is because hard-hit Haredi communities would be most affected, and would constitute "persecution of Haredi people," he argued. As a result, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeatedly imposed country-wide lockdowns – unnecessarily, unfairly, and to great harm.
Deri also defended the fact many Haredi schools stayed open throughout the lockdowns, while the rest of the country's children were forced to learn on Zoom.
Deri's successful attempts to "soften plan after plan" of the Health Ministry relating to the coronavirus pandemic continued into planning for the Lag BaOmer festivities in Meron in 2021.
The root cause of all these disasters lies in the aggressive assertion of autonomy by the Haredi community; autonomy from the broader Israeli world in everything from education and national service to coronavirus lockdowns and safety regulations.
Any time Israeli leaders seek to nudge the Haredi community, for its own good and for the good of the entire country, towards compliance with logical and necessary norms – Haredi politicians cry "gevalt," with Aryeh Deri leading the charge. This includes simple things like studying math, science, and civics; going to work; contributing to the national security burden; upholding building standards in Haredi neighborhoods and health guidelines in Haredi communities.
Deri and his gang term such ideas as "czarist decrees" or "persecution," and then protest violently in the streets, claiming to be victims of a domineering and decadent secular leadership.
In fact, it is the Haredi community that has become a dominant political force in this country. It is secular politicians who are afraid of Haredi political power, not the opposite. Alas, this has allowed Haredi politicians to carve out an increasingly autonomous and ruinous society for themselves.
But who is going to dare try to impose such restrictions upon powerful Haredi politicians and their belligerent, often-anti-Zionist, rabbinical masters?
Deri should be slammed with responsibility for these many ideological, communal policy and management failures, and be shamed out of politics once and for all. I am certain that the biblical prophet Isaiah had Arye Deri specifically in mind when he warned that "Your ministers are rebellious and companions of thieves; they all love bribes and pursue perks…" (Isaiah 1:23).
But of course, I suspect that Deri has no plans to truly exit Israeli politics. He resigned once before (in 2014) from the Knesset and from Shas party leadership, but that was just another maneuver meant to re-catapult the wheeling-dealing Deri back into the driver's seat.
And last year, he got a soft plea bargain deal from the court when being convicted (again) of tax fraud – by telling the court that he no longer intended to pursue public office.
For this most recent dissimilation, the Supreme Court this week applied the legal principle of "heshtek," meaning shut up. You, Arye Deri, have no right to make any political or legal claim before this court, the justices wrote.
Unfortunately, I expect that we will see Deri back soon as speaker of the Knesset or as alternate prime minister, following some fancy and patently immoral political maneuvers by his current coalition partners.
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