"……Haredi right-wing tendencies are not etched in stone. In fact, the late and revered Rabbi Menachem Eliezer Shach clearly opposed the settlements, and forbade his followers from purchasing apartments outside the green line (as a side note, many did exactly that, and the haredi city of Kiryat Sefer is now the largest settlement. As mentioned, reality and policy are not always one and the same). Additionally, both Rav Shach and Rav Ovadia Yossef [sic] stated that land could and should be negotiated over, in the event that bloodshed would thus be prevented.…"
Pnina Pfeuffer writes in the Jerusalem Post:
…We haredim are not Right, nor are we Left. We have a unique set of values. The reason for the current affiliation with the right-wing parties is both historical and cultural. The historical aspect includes the scars embedded in haredi consciousness of the old Left’s trampling of minority rights, including those of haredim.
…[H]aredi right-wing tendencies are not etched in stone. In fact, the late and revered Rabbi Menachem Eliezer Shach clearly opposed the settlements, and forbade his followers from purchasing apartments outside the green line (as a side note, many did exactly that, and the haredi city of Kiryat Sefer is now the largest settlement. As mentioned, reality and policy are not always one and the same). Additionally, both Rav Shach and Rav Ovadia Yossef stated that land could and should be negotiated over, in the event that bloodshed would thus be prevented.…
What Pfeuffer either does not grasp or fails to admit is that facts on the ground matter. More than one-third of all West Bank Jewish settlers are now haredim (the actual number is likely now closer to 40%, and these people and their relatives inside the Green Line in Israel proper will likely not back any territorial concessions for peace. And that likely means Israel's haredim will be functionally right-wing no matter what their actual philosophical or theological worldview may be.
Pfeuffer also claims haredim moved rightward due to mistreatment by the old secular left. But that claim is only partially true. Haredim sit in Knesset only because doing so allows those haredi politicians to serve as funnels for government funding of the haredi community. Pfeuffer admits as much in her article. In the late 1970s, Menachem Begin's Herut Party, which morphed into what we know today as Likud, basically bought haredi support by outbidding the left. It wasn't anger at leftist mistreatment that caused haredim to support a Likud government – it was money.
But in those days there were almost no West Bank haredi settlers. Now there are a huge number. And that number creates facts on the ground, facts that grow exponentially with each passing year.
Don't look for a heartfelt haredi shift back to the left any time soon – unless the left can somehow mass enough votes and enough money to buy it.