Deri must return to the Interior Ministry. Specifically, to the Interior Ministry. For the symbolism. There is increasing talk about offers that the Shas chairman, who returned from exile, is receiving for another portfolio in the government. He must not agree.
There is something conciliatory in the air.
There is truly room to admire the generosity and broad-mindedness of those elites who say today that Deri should be allowed to return to his ministerial position in the Israeli government for a variety of reasons. Because he "paid his debt to society," or because "a quarter of a million people elected him," or because "the acts for which he was tried were committed thirty years ago when he was in his twenties and today he is already in his fifties.".
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Or even a radical legal argument I heard, "Because the court sometimes makes mistakes, and therefore the path of a convicted political leader to return to political life permanently should not be blocked.".
So it's really, really nice (and especially brave) on their part, but it seems that the narrative of the Mizrahi struggle needs to be emphasized and refined and clarified that this narrative rejects even the assumption that Deri was convicted because the court made a mistake: Deri was not convicted by mistake and therefore should be allowed to return, Deri was convicted maliciously and therefore should be allowed to return.
Deri was not convicted by mistake, but was convicted as part of a campaign of sectarian persecution against a Mizrahi leader who took the elites out of their minds and out of their judgment, when he managed to get the Mizrahi people to vote for themselves (as many as 17 seats in the last elections that he led in 1999 before his dramatic removal to prison. He has now returned with only seven, if anyone does not understand how alarming a political assassination this was and how it changed the historical pattern of Mizrahi leadership).
Deri's return to the Interior Ministry, after a harsh 22-year ban from the ministry, is an important step on the path to establishing the reconciliation committee.
Let it be clear, when the equivalent of the Reconciliation Commission between whites and blacks established in South Africa is established in Israel, at the end of the apartheid period, the affair of the relentless ethnic persecution against Deri - from criminalization to racial vilification and demonization - will receive its rightful place, as one of the most prominent events in the history of the oppression of Mizrahi Jews in Israel.
So Deri receives offers to give up the Interior Ministry and serve as minister in another ministry. It will be easier for him and invite less criticism in the High Court, but Deri must insist on the Interior Ministry.
Return to the scene of the crime, not his, theirs.
• From Avishai Ben Haim's Facebook page
