It has only been a matter of days since the chareidi
representatives in the Knesset, under the direction of the
gedolim, raised their hands in support of the current
government, in the expectation that the new Prime Minister
and all the partners of the coalition would keep their part
of the agreement that they just signed with United Torah
Judaism (UTJ) to make legal arrangements for yeshiva students
to continue their studies uninterrupted, and to maintain the
religious status quo. But days is all it took for these
agreements to be violated, both in letter and in spirit.
The only paragraph in the entire coalition agreement that
contains the adverb "immediately" or anything similar, is the
one that says that a committee will be appointed immediately
to draft a proposal for a legal solution to the High Court's
posed problem of supplying a legal basis for the Security
Minister's deferring the army service of yeshiva students, as
every Security Minister has done for over 50 years. Barak
said that he will be unable to do so until he completes his
current whirlwind diplomatic rounds, which effectively means
that the committee will have its first meeting no sooner than
three weeks after the government was voted into office. It
should be noted that every word of the agreement was debated
and argued over separately, and finally approved by all
signatories.
More destructive of the spirit of the agreement, and Barak's
desire to be a unifying force in Israel, have been the
deliberately provocative announcements of the Minister of
Education and the Minister of Justice.
Yossi Sarid, the new Minister of Education, lost no time in
announcing that he will de-emphasize Judaism, compared to his
predecessors who were from the National Religious Party, and
emphasize "civics and democracy." But Sarid is not content to
harm the general educational system (mamlachti); he
has also threatened to intervene -- in both budget and
curriculum -- in the independent educational system
(chinuch atzmai).
If anyone could be expected to respect written agreements it
should be the Minister of Justice. Yet already in the
ceremony of handing over the Ministry, which usually is
marked only by festive remarks, Yossi Beilin declared that he
intends to radically revise the laws of personal status such
as marriage and divorce, which are now interpreted and
enforced by the Chief Rabbinate. He followed up by declaring
that he wants to make intermarriage respectable by basing it
on "secular conversion," an oxymoron if there ever was one,
and virtually erasing whatever is left of the original
religious "status quo."
One of the important provisions of the agreement is that only
the government as a whole is supposed to propose laws that
relate to religious matters. Yet several such proposals were
made last Wednesday.
One of those was a law proposed by Avi Yechezkel, who is
close to Barak and was his candidate for Chairman of the
Knesset Committee, though he lost out to Salah Tarif. In his
campaign speeches for that post, Yechezkel stressed how loyal
he is to Barak. Yet the law he proposed was identical to the
law that Barak submitted a year ago, and that is clearly
negated by the coalition agreement so recently signed.
In addition, a member of Meretz, one of the senior members of
the government, submitted two bills that are knowingly anti-
religious, Meretz as a whole submitted an anti-religious
Basic Law, and Yossi Katz of One Israel is a co-sponsor (with
a member of Likud who is not bound by any agreements) of a
law to set up a constitution.
It is to be hoped that the Prime Minister will not be too
distracted by his dealings with world leaders to deal with
the issues of unity at home, which are vitally important in
the long and short runs.
