Coalition Of Right-Wing, Zionist Orthodox And Haredi Parties Could Have Enough Seats To Govern, New Poll Finds

Israel’s Knesset TV Channel commissioned a poll that found that a coalition of right-wing, Zionist Orthodox and haredi political parties could win enough seats in a new election to govern.

 

Coalition Of Right-Wing, Zionist Orthodox And Haredi Parties Could Have Enough Seats To Govern, New Poll Finds
Shmarya Rosenberg • FailedMessiah.com

Israel’s Knesset TV Channel commissioned a poll that reportedly found that a coalition of right-wing, Zionist Orthodox and haredi political parties could win enough seats in a new election to govern.

The poll, conducted by the Panels Institute, found that this potential coalition would have 71 seats out of 120. A simple majority of 61 seats is enough to form a government.

According to a report in Yeshiva World, the breakdown of seats after the next election if the election were to be held today would be as follows. The numbers in parentheses are a party’s current number of Knesset seats:

The Right-Wing and Haredi Parties

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party: 28 (31 counting the seats of the primarily Russian secularist Yisrael Beiteinu Party of Avigdor Lieberman).

The Zionist Orthodox HaBayit Yehudi Party: 19 (12).

The Sefardi haredi Shas Party: 7 (11)

The Ashkenazi haredi United Torah Judaism Party: 8 (7)

Yisrael Beitenu, the primarily Russian secularist Yisrael Beiteinu Party of Avigdor Lieberman, if it runs separately from Likud: 9.

The Centrist Parties

Finance Minister Yair Lapid’scentrist and largely secular Yesh Atid Party: 11 (19).

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni’s centrist Hatnua Party: 4 (6).

The centrist Kadima Party: Kadima 0 (2).

The Left-Wing and Arab Parties

Labor: 15 (15).

Meretz Party: 10 (6).

Hadash: 3 (4).

Balad: 3 (3).

Ahmed Tibi’s Arab Ra’am-Ta’al Party: (4).

Comments

[Garnel Ironheart]

I'm shocked. Meretz would get as much as ten seats?
Polls are worthless, Shmarya. We're in the aftermath of a prolonged terror war and the economy is strong so nationalist sentiment is high. The situation might be entirely different by the time an election is actually called.

[Alter Kocker]

Hopefully the secular majority realizes that they are being hijacked by the religious parties so that more of their hard earned shekels get wasted on stipends and welfare for yeshiva bums. Without SHAS and UTJ, Israel would lead the world in religious homeless.

[nachos]

Israel already leads the world in homeless Holocaust survivors.

[Miggo Wagga]

The root and cause of the problem in Israel is that the Jews never made any attempt to incorporate the Palestinians into Israeli and specifically Jewish society, even though most of the Palestinians have Jewish ancestry and many of the early Zionist leaders were aware of this. Travellers who went to Palestine in the early 1800s reported on the complete absence of mosques in what's now the West Bank outside Jerusalem and Hebron. They also noted the many Jewish customs and traditions that existed among the fellahin and the fact that most of them adhered to an odd mixture of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Samaritan Judaism. However, the Zionist establishment, being largely secular, ignored all of this and did not make any attempt to understand the Arabic culture. They could have enlisted the support of the Spanioli and Mustarabi Jews who were intimately familiar with the culture, having lived together with it for hundreds of years in the land.

The second major mistake that was made was the destruction by the Zionists, of the classical Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Teimani cultures, forcibly secularising those Jews and removing the influences of their traditional rabbis and leaders. These varieties of Judaism were open-ended, rationalistic while at the same time being open to Kabbalistic insight, and non-fanatical. Instead of trying to destroy those cultures, the Zionists should have co-opted them in influencing the Palestinians to return to their ancestral Judaism, especially given the numerous similarities in language and culture with the Palestinians.

Even today, Israel continues to perpetuate the problem because it favours only one variety of Judaism. Reform, Conservative, secular spiritual, liberal Orthodox, Karaite, and Ethiopian traditional Judaism all are relegated to the periphery of Israeli society. No attempt has been made to revive classic Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaism, and now even the Dati Leumi communities have been disenfranchised from the religious establishment. In fact, even Ashkenazi Judaism has suffered due to it being co-opted by fundamentalist rabbis who are much more extreme than most of them were in Europe.

The only forms of Judaism favoured by the Israeli government are as follows:

1. Hasidic Judaism, and not the spontaneous, nonjudgmental Hasidic Judaism of the early Hasidic masters either, but Hasidic Judaism as it came to be from the 1860s or so onward with its rebbe-worship and increasingly extreme practices.

2. Hungarian Orthodoxy that has become increasingly Hasidic in influence and structure.

3. Hassidic influenced Lithuanian Judaism, devoid of the rationalism and reason characteristic of old style Litvaks.

4. Sephardic Haredi Judaism, which is simply an incorporation of the old Sephardi and Mizrahi customs and traditions into a Lithuanian Haredi cultural and social mindset, which itself is heavily Hasidic influenced.

Now, with the new government, these negative influences, which have made Judaism in Israel corrupt, are only set to increase.