It took a lot of political talent to turn Avigdor Lieberman, of all people, into the bad guy of this past week. Not that I was so impressed by the man's sticking to values and morality, or his willingness to battle for haredi conscription as if he were saving Israel from the Philistines, but all the political shifts of the past few months were created by someone else, someone who managed to manipulate the entire system for the sake of his own very personal interests. Nothing like it has ever happened in Israel.
The election for the 21st Knesset should have taken place at the end of the year like it was originally scheduled to. The moment Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heard that the State Attorney's Office was preparing to indict him pending a hearing, he decided to move the election forward to avoid running for prime minister while under indictment.
The election was held on April 9 not because of any deep-seated political reasons or economic factors that required it to be brought forward, and certainly not because political demands that couldn't have been solved otherwise. The true reason for the recent election was purely because the State Attorney's Office decided to serve an indictment – a decision that has not been revoked despite the decision to hold an early election in September. In the end, at the end of a bunch of particularly ugly, low-blow campaigns, the election didn't result in a victory for any side. For the first time in Israeli history, two large parties won the same number of votes, and because Netanyahu had committed to giving Deputy Defense Minister Eli Ben-Dahan of the Union of Right-Wing Parties a slot on the Likud list (No. 27), and "putting him back" after the election, the situation should have been 35 seats for Blue and White, and only 34 for the Likud. In any case, the right-wing/haredi bloc wound up losing a seat in the last election, dropping from 66 to 65.
Because Blue and White announced from the start that it would consider building a coalition with the Likud or joining a Likud coalition, as long as the aforementioned coalition was not led by someone who was under a cloud of suspicions of bribery, Netanyahu found himself in a situation in which he had very little room to maneuver, and the only coalition he could have put together would have been one that included the Likud, the haredim, the right wing, and the extreme Right, with its acolytes of Meir Kahane.
Those who share Netanyahu's ideology are not necessarily his friends, and they took advantage of the situation after the election to get the most they could: a faction of only four MKs was supposed to have gotten the finance portfolio, and defense would have gone to a faction of five. A faction of only seven would have received the justice and education portfolios. Surprisingly, Lieberman wasn't satisfied with portfolios, and he played the game as if he had nothing to lose: if his five demands were met, he could join the coalition as someone who had defeated his political rivals and gotten everything he'd wanted, and if they weren't, he would become a national hero who refused to sell his "principles" for a handful of ministerial positions. On the big issues (the next war in Gaza, for example), he apparently managed to reach understandings with Netanyahu, but to pass his haredi draft bill, he needed the agreement of the haredi parties, and the prime minister couldn't get them to say "uncle."
That left Netanyahu with 60 MKs for a coalition, and it wasn't enough. That is when a candidate to assemble a governing coalition is supposed to go back to the president and glumly inform him that they have been unable to complete the task. It's already happened.
But the personal motive resurfaced: it appears that Netanyahu decided not to handle his pre-indictment hearing and, if necessary, his bribery trial, in the way that former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert did and resign as prime minister. He wants to go into his legal proceedings as prime minister, as the law allows him to do. If he were to inform Rivlin that he could not assemble a coalition, the president would have two weeks to find another MK who could. To prevent that, Netanyahu decided to block the presidential move and throw the country into the uproar of a new election, which has never happened in Israel.
When the prime minister appeared on all the national TV channels on Monday and vented about Lieberman and the difficulties he was throwing up, explaining the ridiculous cost of a new election and how a new election would paralyze the government, I agreed with almost every word. The problem was that he refused to answer questions.
I suppose he refused because he was afraid of the only question he would have been asked: "Mr. Prime Minister, it's because of you! If you hadn't dragged us into an election in April to avoid an indictment, and you hadn't cut off the process of forming a new government, there would be no need for the current situation, which is like something out of a Fellini movie. Lieberman is a supporting actor in the script that you, sir, wrote, directed, and starred in."
I have no doubt that the matter of conscription for yeshiva students is one that Lieberman latched onto for political purposes. The leader of Yisrael Beytenu isn't new here, and he knows better than most people that the law is nothing more than an attempt to reach a legal formula that will prevent the Supreme Court from asking the government time after time to fix the appalling discrimination in this area, while keeping the haredim to burn the house down, leaving the coalition, and possibly starting a civil uprising over the draft applying to them, as well.
The bill makes yeshivas responsible for punishing their students who do not enlist in the army and promises financial sanctions if they fail to meet their draft quotas within a given number of years. Lieberman turned his opposition to setting quotas for haredi enlistment into a struggle that if it succeeded, was supposed to result in long lines of yeshiva boys outside the IDF's various conscription offices, on their way to military service.
But it's obvious to everyone that the bill – whether it includes quotas or not – has no chance of increasing the number of haredi conscripts, and could even reduce it, because the haredim will want to prove that they haven't knuckled under to the Zionists.
Both Netanyahu and Lieberman understand that financial punishments won't prompt yeshiva heads to send their flocks to the army. All that could happen is that they will up their efforts to collect money in the haredi community to keep allowing the young people who are released from the army to keep studying Torah, even though many of them are ill-equipped for a life of study, and at no other time in Jewish history have so many young men been yeshiva students.
Both Netanyahu and Lieberman know that there is a simple solution to the problem of inequality. The solution has already been proposed in this newspaper – allowing men the same privilege that is extended to women, who can opt out of military service for reasons of religious observance or conscience.
But who is looking for real solutions?
