Despite the image that the Netanyahu government is trying to show in front of the world as a unified and coherent government, it is not hidden from the view of the fragility of this government, to the point that it has made its steadfastness to this day an unfamiliar matter.
Although the address of the government’s dropping of the government, which most observers expect, is to stop the emotional war that Israel is waging over the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, which will necessarily result in the withdrawal of the duo Smotrich and Bin Ghafir or one of them from the government and work to drop it, the broader view of the nature of the composition that consists of this government reveals to the observers a dangerous player that can be the straw that denotes the back of the government coalition in Israel, but rather It shakes the fragile cohesion in the entire Israeli street, and this player is the “Haredi Parties”.
The Haridis in Israel are the traditional religious trend, which considers that the presence of this state is mainly linked to the extent of its commitment to the provisions of the Torah, and these constitute a percentage that is not easy in Israeli society, exceeding 13 % of the total population of the population that includes the Druze and the Palestinians inside.
As for their percentage to the total number of the 7 million people in Israel, it reaches 17 %, after their percentage was in the wake of the Palestinian catastrophe and the establishment of the occupying state does not exceed 2.6 %. The Israel Statistics Department believes that they are candidates to reach 35 % by 2059.
This high percentage is currently proportional to their representation in the Knesset, as they control 18 out of 120 by up to 15 % of the total seats. The (Shas) party comes at the forefront of the Harid parties in the Knesset, where it controls 11 seats, followed by the Haridi Hatura party, which operates 7 seats.
With a simple calculation, it turns out that the Netanyahu government is based on a fragile majority that does not exceed four seats, as its coalition possesses only 64 seats, out of 120; Of them 32 of the Likud party, and 14 for the Zionist Zionism Alliance led by Smutrich and Bin Ghafir, while the Haredi parties take over the rest.
While we find that most of the voices demanding the overthrow of the government stems from the religious Zionist camp, focusing on the necessity of the war in Gaza and the prevention of the entry of humanitarian aid, the Harid parties adopt a completely different file, which is the recruitment of the Haredim in the Israeli army, which is for her the central issue that may push them to withdraw from the coalition. But, unlike her partners, she does not raise her voice by threatening and does not wave with withdrawing all the time, as Bin Ghafir and Smotrich do almost daily.
The recruitment of Al -Haidim is a fundamental file that has lived in its crisis for decades, as they usually began to exempt them from military service since the time of David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, who exempted 400 immigrants from Haridim from the compulsory recruitment in the army, for several considerations, including that they did not constitute a large percentage of the population at that time as we mentioned above, in addition to his desire to win the friendships of traditional religious interpretations that were frequented in support The idea of a state to establish the Jews at the time, as it made them a pledge that Israel would respect Jewish religious traditions.
He also wanted to confirm the image of Israel as a Jewish state, which could persuade different spectrums of Jews in the world to emigrate.
The reason for Al -Haidim’s insistence on exempting from recruitment in the army was that it contradicts their principles, as they see that their job in the world is to read the Torah and its interpretation, and they believe that this work is sacred and great to the point of believing that the reason for the continuation of life on the planet is, they see in the Torah study a divine task to serve the whole world and preserve it from destruction!
This means that this category does not see the occupying power as well as it in anything. Rather, it sees that it is credited with the continuation of life in the occupying state and the survival of its army in its wars, especially in this war.
This is what the largest rabbi of the eastern Sephardic community, Yusq Yusuf, referred to him in his famous statement: “Without religious schools, the army would not have succeeded, because the soldiers did not succeed except thanks to the people of the Torah.” This rabbi himself is the one who threatened to leave the people of his sect, all of the occupation state irreversibly in the event that the compulsory recruitment is imposed on them.
The followers of the Haridi movement had benefited a lot from the arrival of the Likud to rule in Israel, because the Likud was always keen to satisfy them; In order to support them in the elections and the formation of its successive governments, they did not constitute any crisis, given that their requests usually do not exceed the preservation of the budgets of religious schools and the commitment to keep their exemption from compulsory recruitment, which is at the heart of their permanent requirements from any government.
These Haridis consider that the entry of the army can affect their faith, because they do not see in the Israeli secularists more than a group of secularists, they despise them, and that appeared in more than one position, for example what the Minister of Housing in the Netanyahu government did to the “Yahdout Hatura” party Yitzhak Goldkinv, who ignited the crisis last year when he appeared in a video dancing with a number We are recruited, and we do not accept the virtue of the infidels, “in reference to the secularists in the occupying state.
In 2015, the oath in Israel succeeded in passing a law in the Knesset that exempting the Haridim from the compulsory recruitment in the army, but the Supreme Court intervened and canceled this law under the item of equality, and ordered the creation of legislation that does not include the exemption of the Haraidim, and that was the beginning of the actual crisis that exacerbated in light of the current battle that tired the occupation army and forced it to summon reserves to compensate for the severe shortage.
Despite this, the problem was not solved, which led to the escalation of the national secular voices calling for the compulsory recruitment of the Haridim, as stipulated in the Supreme Court’s decision.
And since the majority of the voices calling for the recruitment of the Haridim are secular, left and right, the Harid parties returned to see them as a battle between the supporters of the Torah and the supporters of the heresy, or between light and darkness, and thus the trends of booing escalate for them; In refusal to comply with the opinion of those who want them to leave the study of the Torah and mix them with the army in a way that leads to forgetting the Torah and deviating from the law.
On the other hand, they escalate among the secularists, whether from leftists or right -wing nationalists in Israel calls for pressure on the Haredim to recruit, just like others. And their argument is a logical that the soldiers pay their lives as a price to defend a group of religious people who do nothing to society and do not defend it, but rather despise it. This division, which came to the street now warns of more fragmentation of the Israeli society itself.
For the truth, it is the sharp nature of the statements of the leaders of the Haredim that increases the gap between the two parties.“And that “it is better to eat pork to exist in a secular society and a secular thought”, and the announcement of some of their symbols that “there is no common culture between the secular Israelis and the Haridim”, to other statements conveyed by the Israeli media from time to time, all this indicates that there is no common ground between the Haridim and the secularists of different paths and ideas. This means that the crisis that is currently escalating between the two parties warns that it expands in the street and is not only satisfied with being in the corridors of the government and the Knesset.
So, the Haridim crisis is far from the solution in light of the upscale view that each party looks at the other, and it is a candidate for the exacerbation in the coming period. Israeli street (70 %) for this exemption.
The question here is: To what extent can the Haridim crisis expand?
The vast majority of analysts’ opinions in this regard stand in the answer to this question when the Netanyahu government may be overthrown in the event of the withdrawal of Haridim from it, but I see that there are much deeper dimensions than just toppling the Netanyahu government.
The Israeli street was not a day divided as it is today. At a time when those under the occupation army brigades attack students of the Bahidi religious schools, claiming that the soldiers are not obligated to sacrifice their blood for a handful of students who do nothing but study and talk in jurisprudence, the Haridim are in their accent against the entire state system, and they are clearly talking about the misguidance of Israeli society from outside the Haredi, any More than 80 % of the population of this state is Jews, not Arabs!
Consequently, mutual rejection can actually lead to engagement in the street and the outbreak of violence that leads to much greater disturbances than all that the two parties imagine.
When the leader of the Sephardic threatens to leave his disbelief with Israeli citizenship and the idea of the national homeland of the Jews, he thus clearly declares that he and his followers are not linked to the Zionist project and they are not convinced of the possibility of the state or even belonging to it, and thus he is cultivated in Israel the seeds of fragmentation and internal erosion that all Israeli analysts fear and expect it at the same time.
The opinions in the article do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al -Jazeera.