The incoming coalition is very homogenous. The various right-wing parties that will soon swear in a Likud-led government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu are all like-minded when it comes to the settlement enterprise, bolstering governability, and judicial reforms. It would be a waste of time to try to find any meaningful differences between the various factions on these issues. But there is one area where they don't see eye to eye, and this could hurt the public in the court of public opinion: religion's role in the state.
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The Nov. 1 election was very different from the previous four rounds. With Yamina no longer having any political viability, many of its erstwhile voters in the national religious sector opted to park their support with the Religious Zionist Party led by Bezalel Smotrich. That party, which was an alliance of various elements, included the anti-LGBT party, Noam. This vote for Smotrich meant that the Yamina voters cast their ballot based on who would promote their right-wing agenda - which is very much at odds with what the Haredi parties espouse when it comes to conversion, kashrut, LGBT laws, and Haredi enlistment in the IDF.
Likud voters subscribe to liberal economic worldviews and generally lead a secular lifestyle. They may very well be in favor of bolstering Israel's Jewish character, but they don't want any government-led faith-based initiatives that would dramatically change things.
Even Otzma Yehudit, a far-Right party that ran with Smotrich, has not made demands on religious issues and has even taken great pride in having gotten the votes of many secular Israelis who saw its leader Itamar Ben-Gvir as the one who would restore personal safety.
If the incoming government shows that it is beholden to the Haredim on LGBT issues by backing discriminatory bills and does not show any progress on Judea and Samaria settlements and judicial reforms – it will soon discover that it had lost support among its core supporters on the Right who made the Nov. 1 victory possible.
That's why Netanyahu went out of his way to disavow Religious Zionist Party MK Orit Strock's statement that a new bill should allow doctors to refuse service to certain people whose views run against theirs.
For whatever reason, the Religious Zionist Party has been focused on this matter, rather than on legislation that would allow overriding Supreme Court Decisions. Perhaps Strock's comments can explain this. "Israeli law must stop treating Jewish law as if it is inferior," she said. Many religious voters, who let Halachah be dominant in their private lives, are going to be reluctant to have it become the law of the land that governs Israel's public square.
While it may be true that right-wing voters would prefer to accommodate the religious demands of various parties than to have the Left take power, they envision an Israel that is Jewish in a traditional bottom-up sense rather than a top-down Jewish theocracy that would legislate Judaism's role in our lives.
If the new government forgets its mission to advance the whole gamut of right-wing issues and singularly focuses on making Israel a more religious country, voter disaffection will be palpable among those who secured the Right's victory in the polls.
Israeli voters elect their parties based on tribal identity much more than on anything else. If a significant bloc of right-wing voters feel alienated by anti-LGBT rhetoric in the government, they will not be swayed to keep their allegiance easily, not even by the warning that the alternative is the Left.
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