Israel Matzav

'A vote for Netanyahu is a vote for Barak'

Is Defense Minister Ehud Barak behind the current harassment of religious soldiers by the IDF? Please recall this story from an earlier post. I received the following comment about it from Aryeh Z, who sends me regular emails.

We can now clearly see that, like their Arab "Peace Partners," the word and signed agreements of the Government of Israel (GOI) and that of the IDF are worthless. It is unfortunate that the only alternative given Torah Jews now in the IDF is to either betray G-D or go to jail. While betrayal seems to be SOP for the GOI and the IDF, it is not for Torah Jews.

Furthermore all of this has the stench of the Coward of Lebanon to it. Barak has become psychopathologically obsessed with the destruction of the Torah community in all its variations and styles. Whether this is just the real Barak coming out or he has finally gone completely over the edge is irrelevant. He is as much an existential danger to the State of Israel as any Arab army or terrorist organization. We must also realize and acknowledge that all of this is being done under the protection of his guardian angle, the Betrayer of Hevron, Mr. Prime Minster Netanyahu.

Those of you who are Likud member and will be participating in the up coming election for Likud leader must understand that a vote for Netanyahu is a vote for Barak. They have become a package deal. Netanyahu will do everything he can to place Barak in a high position on the Likud list. The only thing that can prevent this is either for Netanyahu to loose or just barely win the leadership.

For those who can't or won't get it, when Aryeh refers to the 'Torah community in all its variations and styles,' he is referring to both the Haredim and to a major portion of the National Religious community. Many National Religious men today opt to perform their IDF service in Nahal Haredi for the same reason that Haredi men do so.

But let's come back to Ehud Barak for a minute, because people don't usually think of him as being in the same anti-religious category as an MK from Meretz (for example). They forget that it was Barak who, in the aftermath of the Camp David disaster in the summer of 2000, attempted to foment a 'secular revolution.'

The battle lines between Orthodox and secular Israelis were drawn sharper than ever this week.

The nation's two chief rabbis reversed themselves and joined Orthodox politicians in the fight against Prime Minister Ehud Barak's recently announced "civic agenda."

Dubbed by the press a "secular revolution," the program was announced by Barak earlier this month in an effort to usher in an era of secular reforms.

The first step, ordered this week by acting Interior Minister Haim Ramon, calls for the removal of the nationality clause from the identity card that every Israeli must carry.

Removing the clause could help solve a long-running dispute over conversions performed in the Jewish state, since the state would no longer be responsible for defining who is a Jew.

But those and other components of the secular revolution have been attacked by some in the Orthodox community as an attempt by the premier to wreak revenge on the religious parties that dropped out of his coalition on the eve of July's Camp David summit.

Only Rabbi Michael Melchior, a member of the Barak government from the small, Orthodox Meimad Party, is still trying to hold the middle ground.

On Sunday, Melchior announced his own reform plan, which he said sought to balance the conflicting demands of both sides of the religious-secular debate.

Barak said he would seriously consider the plan proposed by Melchior, who has tackled religious-secular issues on behalf of the Barak government.

However, Israel's chief rabbis were less inclined toward compromise when it came to Barak's planned reforms -- especially his proposal to abolish the Religious Affairs Ministry.

At a stormy meeting Monday with the "Orthodox lobby" of legislators from the religious parties, the two chief rabbis confirmed that they had supported the idea in the past, contending that the ministry and the religious councils it governs are hotbeds of mismanagement.

The rabbis said they originally thought Barak's plan was designed to improve the provision of religious services to local communities.

But in light of Barak's other secular reforms, they have now decided that the plan to abolish the ministry was politically motivated.

"We call" on Barak, Justice Minster Yossi Beilin and "on all the national leadership to preserve the Jewish character of the state, and to cease and desist from any process that contravenes the integral relationship between religion, state and peoplehood," the rabbis announced, throwing down the gauntlet to Barak.

But the secular revolution was not to be. Within a week of that article being written, the country was overcome with the violent outbreak of the second intifada. And within four months after that, Barak had been chased from office. Some observers saw a connection. It was God telling us that enough was enough. This was written by Jonathan Rosenblum just before the election in which Barak was defeated:

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch's words, written at the beginning of Jewish resettlement of Eretz Yisrael, haunt me. Hirsch warned that there is no Divine promise that we will not be exiled once again: "From time to time in the course of the centuries, God allowed His people to touch the Land again. He put them to the test to see whether the miracle of their existence through centuries of exile had at last taught them to utterly despise the gods of the earth, and had eradicated their stiff-necked refusal to acknowledge the Divine word."

The evidence on that score is not encouraging. A month before the renewal of the intifada, our prime minister announced a secular revolution. Buses would run on Shabbat, the malls would be open, nationality would no longer be listed on our identity cards. A month later, after Arafat emptied the jails of every Hamas terrorist, some malls were empty for fear of terrorist attacks. Parents were asking themselves before they sent their children on any bus: Is the trip necessary? The soon-to-be-erased line for nationality became the basis on which the security forces screened potential terrorists.

The violence first flared in full force on the eve of the Day of Judgment on Judaism's holiest site. Just days before, Israel had been floating the idea of transferring control of the Temple Mount to the UN Security Council. (Remember when that seemed a radical idea?)

A week later, Israel stood condemned for war crimes by the same Security Council. God seemed to be pointing directly at our loss of national identity - the destruction of which was the unspoken goal of the secular revolution - as the source of our trials.

The message fell on deaf ears.

Assessing the failures of his tenure in office recently, the prime minister could think of only one: not pursuing the secular revolution more aggressively. He promised to do so if re-elected.

Barak's vulgar materialism - his watchmaker's sensibility - leaves no room for God's influence in the affairs of men and nations. In the materialist universe, only that which can be measured exists. And who has seen God or, for that matter, the human soul?

That same materialism prevents Barak from comprehending the role of will and spirit in the life of nations. He cannot understand that a nation without a past is a nation without a future. Arafat demands as a condition of peace that the Jewish people abase itself and admit that the Temple Mount is more important to the Arab world than it is to the Jews. That is the whole point of the exercise over sovereignty: to prove that nothing could induce the Arab nation to renounce its claim to the Temple, while the Jews will do so for will-o'-the-wisp pieces of paper.

So yes, Ehud Barak is hostile to religious Jews (so is Tzipi Livni). And yes, Binyamin Netanyahu has given every indication that he wants Barak in the Likud (and Barak doesn't have a shot in hell of being elected to the Knesset again unless he finds another party). Yet another reason that those who are able to do so should vote for Feiglin later this month.

Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, secular revolution

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:18 AM