Some of the Haredi public and some of the Arab public are not willing to play our game. Their spokespeople claim that generalizations are being made and that the majority of their sectors are disciplined and act in accordance with public health directives. That is true, just as it's true that the minority creating provocations and showing contempt for law enforcement is significant, and the majority chooses to ignore them.
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What has taken place in the Haredi street these past few days is an eruption of a growing tendency to rebel against the rules of the game. When a rabbi from the extremist Jerusalem Faction was asked about Jewish law vs. the laws of the state, he no longer bothers with diplomacy (just like he does not refrain from appearing on television), and says that Torah study by Jewish children keeps the world safe, and clearly takes precedence above any law or government decision.
In the past, extremist Haredi sects were notable for burning Israeli flags on Independence Day and refusing to honor the moment of silence on Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism. Their followers do not vote, and a small part of them also declines to accept National Insurance Institute stipends. That is how angry they are that we dared to establish a Jewish state. But the collective refusal by a group of Haredi travelers to wear masks on a United flight a few days ago, while slashing with the crew members who begged them to put them on, tells the whole story.
It appears as if they're saying, enough with shutting ourselves off, enough of living in a self-imposed ghetto, enough with living on crumbs just for the sake of boycotting Zionism. The boycotters have become proud: rabbis make the decisions, not the institutions of the state, which they perceive as illegal. This is no longer a secret whispered in certain yeshivas and kollels, it's pride of solidarity that has been forced out into the open by COVID, and they see that we are pretty helpless in the face of it.
When the prime minister phones the grandson of Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, one of the most prominent leaders of Lithuanian Judaism, and the guy isn't willing to take the call on which he would be begged to convince the elderly rabbi not to send the sector's children to school, it announces that government authorities are weak, not to say broken.
This is an ongoing process that has picked up momentum in the year of COVID. A response to it cannot begin and end with a demand for more violent law enforcement. The police officer who fired in the air on Sunday when he was surrounded by a mob of Haredim is an expression of the major difficulty in dealing with citizens of Israel who act as if their citizenship was foisted on them against their will.
It's possible that no action can be taken before the election, but it is necessary to launch dialogue with Haredi leaders who cannot accept the actions of extremists and reach understandings with them about cases in which the Haredi sector refuses to accept the law of the land. The religious decree that Jews must abide by the law of the land, which applies to Diaspora Jewry, actually doesn't apply in the Jewish state. That has to change before we find ourselves in a civil war.
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