Israel's chief rabbi elections tainted by personal interests - opinion

Arye Deri is one of the most well-known politicians in Israel and his two criminal convictions are what Israel has to thank for the controversial law passed last week that annulled the Supreme Court’s use of reasonableness as grounds for disqualifying government decisions.

What most Israelis do not know though, is that Deri has an older brother – Yehuda – who currently serves as the chief rabbi of Beersheba. And like his younger brother – the leader of the Shas Party – Rabbi Deri from Beersheba is now also the recipient of a special law passed a few weeks ago just for him – an extension of the current chief rabbis’ term so that the older Deri can potentially get the job next spring.

A bit of background: Israel has two chief rabbis, one Ashkenazi and one Sephardi. They are usually elected to a term of 10 years and the current rabbis – Yitzhak Yosef and David Lau – were supposed to step down at the end of the year. Under the current coalition agreement, two parties were supposed to put forward candidates – Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionist Party received the Ashkenazi chief rabbi and Deri the Sephardi one.

Presumably, an easy split. The problem is that two people want the Sephardic chief rabbi role – one is Deri’s older brother Yehuda and the other is David Yosef, the brother of the outgoing chief rabbi and son of Shas’s late spiritual leader and founder, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. This puts Arye Deri in a bind: on the one hand, he has the opportunity to appoint his brother but that would put him at odds with the Yosef family, his political patrons.

So what did the Shas leader do? He had one of his party members legislate a law that postpones the chief rabbinate election by six months, until sometime next April. By then, Deri hopes, he will find a way to get David Yosef elected chief rabbi of Jerusalem and then clear the path for his older brother to become the country’s chief rabbi.

This is also not the only law that the current coalition is passing that will further cement haredi control over all things religious in Israel. According to another law proposed by Shas, the religious services minister will soon receive broader authority to appoint city rabbis at the expense of mayors. Another proposed law will significantly increase salaries for religious council heads.

It is perfectly fine not to care about all of this and to write it off as the price any government will have to pay when sitting in the same coalition with the ultra-Orthodox. To most people who read this, the chief rabbinate plays absolutely no role in their lives and, if it ever does, it is almost exclusively negative.

On the other hand, this is an illustration of all that is wrong with this government. Instead of passing laws that help the people and the nation, its members are focused on helping themselves, or in the case of the chief rabbinate, one of their brothers. If this is not a conflict of interest, I am not sure what one is anymore.

Personal conflicts of interest infect Israeli politics

THIS IS the situation in Israel today, where everything seems sideways and every appointment is an opportunity to help someone’s close associate or family. Take the case of the Israel Postal Service. After years of failures, incompetency, and corruption, a new chairman and CEO were appointed 18 months ago. The two – Mishael Vaknin and David Laron – came from the private sector after successful careers in business.

They turned the place around, cutting jobs that had been created just for political appointments and streamlining the work. It paid off, and in the first quarter of 2023, the postal service, which still has a long way to go, saw an NIS 23 million profit, for the first time in years.

The problem was that Vaknin was appointed by the last government and the new minister in charge – Likud’s Shlomo Karhi – wanted his own guy. Karhi decided a few weeks ago to fire Vaknin, a move that is pretty much unheard of in the public sector, especially when dealing with an executive who is still in the middle of his term and has been, so far, successful.

But that is all secondary for Karhi. First is what he can get for himself. 

This is the trademark of this government and has been since its inception. Even the judicial overhaul smacks of personal interests. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, staved off attempts by members of his previous coalitions to weaken the Supreme Court for years. When did that change? The moment that he was indicted.

When this is the culture, everyone thinks they can do what they want. On Sunday, the cabinet approved the transfer of another NIS 165 million budget for yeshiva students as the ultra-Orthodox parties continue with their plans to pass “Basic Law: Torah Study,” a bill that will anchor in law the exemption from IDF military service for yeshiva students.

Benefits for soldiers? Forget about it. First, the coalition needs to take care of its own.

And while the coalition shelved the bill last week amid the uproar over the judicial reform, Moshe Gafni and Yitzhak Goldknopf have no intention of letting it linger. They plan to bring it up again when the Knesset returns from its summer recess at the end of October.

Who knows? Maybe this recess is exactly what the country needs right now. It is an opportunity to take a break from the chaos of the last months and hope that the coalition will reconsider its current trajectory and stop taking care of just itself and its members.

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In 1991, during the First Gulf War, Benjamin Netanyahu made a name for himself in the US, famously donning a gas mask during a live CNN interview. It gave Israelis a cause for celebration – finally, there was an Israeli politician who knew how to speak to the world in its own language.

In the 32 years since, interviews and speeches in English have become a hallmark of Netanyahu’s career and the last few weeks are no exception. Since returning as Israel’s prime minister at the end of December, Netanyahu has given just over 20 interviews but only three of them to Israeli media (one to this paper and two to Channel 14). It seems that a day cannot go by without seeing Netanyahu on Fox News, CNN, NBC, ABC, or NPR.

Journalists in Israel are obviously upset – they want to interview the prime minister – and it is therefore important to point out the three main reasons why Netanyahu does this.

The first is because like in 1991, Netanyahu’s voters enjoy seeing him go up against the foreign media. They take pride in a strong leader who can speak flawless English and take the fight to their so-called “hostile” arena.

The second reason is because it is simply easier. If Netanyahu has to choose between giving an interview to Yonit Levy on Channel 12 or George Stephanopoulos on ABC, he will prefer the ABC anchor since – not to his fault – Stephanopoulos knows less about Israel, will let Netanyahu finish his answers, and will have a harder time exposing the politician’s claims.

In addition, whatever message Netanyahu brings to the foreign media, he sees amplified in Israel where the local media picks up every interview and re-reports it to their own consumers. With that being the case, then why go the hard route?

And then there is the third reason – Netanyahu knows he has a problem today in the US where he has – unprecedentedly – yet to set foot as a guest of President Joe Biden. The reports about a reassessment of US ties with Israel are keeping a lot of people up at night in Israel and Netanyahu knows that the fallout could start to be felt soon in military cooperation, intelligence sharing, and more simple things like just buying spare parts for airplanes.

That is why he pushes three messages in his US interviews: the reasonableness bill is a “minor correction”; the law creates a better balance between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches; and the US is still Israel’s number one ally.

Will these interviews help? Maybe, but they alone are not the solution. Israel has a deeper problem today in the US which even 40 interviews cannot solve on their own.

The writer is the immediate past editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post.