Israel Gets Its First Religious Prime Minister Is Religion Becoming Mainstream in the Jewish State?
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Selected articles concerning Israel, published weekly by Suburban Orthodox Toras Chaim’s (Baltimore) Israel Action Committee Edited by Jerry Appelbaum ( [email protected] ) | Founding editor: Sheldon J. Berman Z”L Issue 8 9 1 Volume 2 1 , Number 2 3 Parshias Chukas June 1 9 , 2021 Israel Gets Its First Religious Prime Minister By Oren Kessler foreignpolicy.com June 7, 2021 Is religion becoming mainst ream in the Jewish state? Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s visionary, was not only Israel is on the brink of its first government in 12 irreligious, but his vision of the Jewish state was barely years led by someone other than Prime Minister Benjamin informed by Jewish tradition. David Ben - Gurion, the Netanyahu. If finalized over the coming week, the new architect of Israel’s independence and its first prime coalition would be, in multiple ways, a historic one. It minister (and longest serving, until Netanyahu), listed would compr ise a record number of parties, including, for himself in a 1960 ce nsus as an atheist. In a recently the first time, an Arab list. A record eight women would revealed letter from the same year, he describes his serve as ministers. The party sending its leader to be prime reaction toward soldiers praying at his desert shack on minister earned the smallest electoral haul of any before it. Yom Kippur. “I did not envy them,” he wrote; prayer But one first may be remember ed as more historic than all “may feel pleasant — yet it is not reality, but self - of these: Israel will have, for the first time, a prime deception. ” minister who is religiously observant. All of Ben - Gurion’s successors in the state’s first three Naftali Bennett announced last weekend that he had decades were secular and socialist. His immediate reached a deal with the party led by Yair Lapid — a centrist, successors — Moshe Sharett, Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir, and secular former news a nchor — in which each would serve Yitzhak Rabin — partook in religious rituals only at their as prime minister for two years in turn. If the agreement is own funerals. Even Vladimir Jaboti nsky, the father of consummated — Netanyahu and others are working right - wing Zionism, was largely unschooled in religious furiously to sabotage it — the result will be the most tradition. Benjamin Netanyahu, Jabotinsky’s ideological unusual government in Israel’s history, uniting Bennett, a heir, works on the Sabbath and rarely enters a synagogue. man of the deep right - wing, with partners from the center Bennett, too, was raised in a non - religious home, to (Lapid), the left (Labor), and even an Arab - Islamist party Myrna and Jim Bennett — liberal Reform Jews from San with ideological roots in the Muslim Brotherhood. Francisco. But in spring 1967, Egypt closed the Straits of Bennett is a territorial maximalist who believes in Tiran in a bid to choke off Israel, and a coalition of Arab annexing 60 percent of the West Bank, with an autonomy states appeared massing for an of fensive that would end arrangement for the Palestinians there. He believes a two - the country’s lifespan at 19. According to Bennett, his state solution, still cherished by the Biden administration parents were stunned that their Jewish - American friends and dwindling elements of the Israeli left, would bring seemed unperturbed, continuing their everyday routines as “disaster” on the Jewish state: “I want the world to the Jewish state’s existence hung in the balance. When understand that a Palestinian state means no Israeli state. Israel p revailed in six days — taking the West Bank, Golan That’s the equation.” Heights, and Sinai Peninsula to boot — they boarded the And yet he’s not quite the wild - eyed settler extremist first civilian flight there. In Upper Galilee, they of caricature, either: He boasts native - level English, a volunteered at that most secular and progressive of all formidable military record, a bank account plumped by an Israeli institutions: the kibbutz. exit from a successfu l tech startup, and a happy home with The Bennet ts subsequently settled in Haifa, where Jim four children in a bourgeois neighborhood near Tel Aviv. worked at the Technion, Israel’s venerable technological More than anything, the potential advent of a Prime university and where Naftali, the youngest of three sons, Minister Bennett represents the mainstreaming of religion was born in 1972. The difficulties of integration, however, in the State of Israel’s 73rd year. He aims to unit e right and proved too much and they returned to California the next left, devout and secular, the hills of Samaria with the summer. country’s high - tech center. He has long believed religious In October of that year, however, another war broke and right - wing Israelis are the silenced majority, their out, with far different fortunes for Israelis. The Yom voices obstructed by left - wing elites in media, the courts, Kippur War caught them utterly unawares; the country and academia . But he favors honey to vinegar; he wants to suffered heavy losses and its existence again appeared in bring Tekoa to Tel Aviv. If in the process the country’s doubt. Jim flew to join his reserve unit in the Golan, and face becomes a little more religious, a little more right - stayed with it for several months. Myrna and the boys wing, so much the better. followed him back to Israel, and the move was now “What is happening is a revolution,” he told Haaretz permanent. nearly a decade ago, and “for me in particular, it’s The family’s religious awakening began slowly, not in important to be a bridge to you. One of the biggest Israel but Montreal and later New York , where Naftali’s challenges from my perspective is to connect you to father was sent on behalf of the Technion and then the religious Zionism, too.” Jewish Agency. “We enrolled the children in Jewish The central figures of Israel’s founding were secular. schools,” the elder Bennett, who died in 2015, told Foc us o n Is rael June 19, 2021 Page 2 Haaretz in a long interview two years before. “We needed abili ties he admired and whose late brother — the hero of a kosher kitchen, becau se other children visited us at the celebrated 1976 Entebbe raid — he idolized. It was in home. We started with simple things, like lighting candles Netanyahu’s office that he also met Ayelet Shaked, a on Sabbath eve. One thing led to another, until we also secular, right - wing former software engineer from Tel started to attend synagogue and so on.” Aviv with whom he would form a long - term p olitical When Bennett was a teenager, he switched from coed partnership. After two years, Bennett and Netanyahu public school to y eshiva. He then joined the army, enlisting parted amid rumors of bad blood with the premier’s wife, in Sayeret Matkal, the same elite commando in which Sara. Netanyahu had served. Bennett later earned an officer’s In 2010 became head of the Yesha Council, the commission, and commanded a company in Maglan, a umbrella organization of Israeli municipal councils in the mysterious, high - tech unit operating deep behind enemy West Bank. He butted heads with the settlement l ines whose very existence was kept secret for decades. In enterprise’s old guard: They were too confrontational, too 1996, during an operation in the village of Qana, south divisive. He wanted not to defeat the country’s liberal - left Lebanon, he called in airstrikes on a U.N. compound that elite, but to win their hearts and minds, to persuade them killed more than 100 civilians. The controversy over that that the Land and Torah of Israel were their inheritance as day has followed him ever s ince. much as his. Friends from his youth recall him as religious, but not In 2012 Bennett left the Likud and won the leadership fanatic. “He always had female friends and today he is of Jewish Home, a small national - religious party. The party absolutely not extreme, but normal in his religious prospered with him at the helm, jumping to fourth in observance,” said one. elections the following year. With newfound leverage, he For several years during his army service he went entered governme nt boasting multiple portfolios bareheaded. In 1995, Prime Minister Rabin was simultaneously. As economy minister he encouraged assassinated by a Jewish extremist opposed to the Oslo greater integration of Israel’s most marginal citizens: ultra - Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Orthodox and Arabs. As minister of religious and diaspora Bennett returned to wearing the skullcap: “The backlash of affairs he held friendly meetings with non - Orthodox the Rabin assassination was a backlash against all the de legations from America and made space for mixed - religious — blame them! — which I thought was very gender and female prayer at the Western Wall. unfair.” “He is not ultra - Orthodox, his yarmulke is small and Bennett’s relatively lax religiosity is reflected in his he is considered ‘religious light,’ perhaps the lightest personal life, too. In the army he met, then married Gilat, possible,” wrote one analyst. “He is not very religi ous an accomplished pastry chef from a secular home. In 2000, necessarily,” added a former high - tech colleague (who after a few months in a West Bank settlement they made a hastened to add: “But he is very right - wing.”) dramatic relocation to Manhattan’s Upper East Side. In late 2018 Bennett and Shaked left the Jewish Home There, he tried his luck in the tech economy while Gilat and established a new party, the New Right, with the won plaudits for her crème brûlée at some of the city’s explicit aim of drawing together secular and religious plushest spots.