1.
MK Gafni hosted Yair Lapid on his birthday. MK Gafni invited Merav Michaeli to his granddaughter's wedding. MK Gafni invited Yair Golan to his grandson's bar mitzvah. MK Gafni invited Idan Roll to Shimsho's Shulam-Zokar.
You can add to this list more and more joys in the Gafni family, and more and more pro-leftist statements by the head of the family, Grandpa Moshe. And from my many years of acquaintance with him, he will indeed provide - for some reason - many more such statements and gestures. But they have no real meaning.
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I'll explain why they don't make sense right away, but before that, I want to focus on "for some reason." I really don't understand what motivates Gafni, the old man of political foxes (who, with his brilliant moves in politics, helped and even saved the right-wing camp), to suddenly make moves that on the surface are exactly, but precisely, the opposite of what he should be doing. And during a crucial election period.
After all, he now has a spillover of young Haredi people to Smotrich and Ben Gvir. He needs to bring them home. More precisely: keep them home. From the perspective of the Haredi leadership, this is an educational mission no less than a political one. It concerns the identity of those young people. Their lifestyles. It concerns the education of their children who are not even born yet. So why does he have all these statements now? I really don't understand. Maybe it's some kind of psychological need? Certainly not a political need.
2.
And here we come to the main point: Why don't all the courtship games of the head of the Degel Hatorah party with the left-wing extremists have much political significance? Very simple. Because Gafni does not, has not, and will not have an ultra-Orthodox electorate for cooperation with the left.
For this to happen, two things need to happen: either the Haredim will abandon the core of their ideology of the last two thousand years, or the left will do it with its world of values of the last hundred years. Well, anyone who reads Haaretz understands that a large part of the left is indeed abandoning central values in the teachings of the founding fathers, but not in a direction that brings it closer to the Haredim, but quite the opposite.
So what motivates Gafni? Maybe it's a kind of desire, which also characterizes some columnists in Yated Ne'eman, to show that he's not following the ultra-Orthodox Bibi crowd. That he's actually a man of Rabbi Schach, the outliner of the Lithuanian outlook in the last generation, and the one who got him into the Knesset thirty-three years ago.
So it's true, Rabbi Schach's theoretical opinion on the issue of returning territories in order to prevent bloodshed is well-known, but this position has no relevance today. First of all, because precisely because of that Pikuach Nefesh, it is clear that today there is no permission to give up even though (Rabbi Schach, as we recall, was still strongly opposed to the Oslo Accords), so this issue is not even on the agenda.
What is on the agenda? What is really at the heart of the next elections? The question that has troubled, that has agitated, Rabbi Schach throughout his years of leadership: Will the State of Israel be a Jewish state or a state of all its citizens?.
Many years ago, Reuven Rivlin - in those days a militant right-winger who was struggling with Aharon Barak's judicial activism - told me how, during a visit to Rabbi Schach in Bnei Brak in the 1990s, the elderly rabbi told him: "You say over and over again that Israel should be a 'Jewish and democratic state.' You know what a 'democratic state' is. But do you have an answer to the question of what a 'Jewish state' means?""
3.
So Merav Michaeli can dance until tomorrow with the help of the women at Gafni's wedding (to the sound of Chabad music!). He can speak at a thousand conferences of the National Conference of Accountants or the National Cobblers' Conference and say that the Haredim are neither right nor left. But what can you do, the facts teach otherwise:
Over the years, Rabbi Schach has made countless harsh statements condemning collaboration with the left. He attacked their progressive spirit decades before everyone was constantly saying the word "progressive." He cried out about the loss of the path, about the disconnection from the ancestral generation. He cried tears over it.
The question of the Jewish identity of the state was much more burning for him than the issue of the territories. He also did not justify his fierce opposition to Oslo on security grounds. He hardly needed them. In other words, even if it were theoretically shown that the Oslo Accords were not a security danger and lawlessness - Rabbi Schach would have opposed them. Why? Very simply: because nothing good can come from initiatives promoted by a government that is alienated from its Jewishness. Period.
And so he wrote in a scathing letter against the Oslo Accords (together with Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach and a host of other rabbis and rebbes), which was published a week before Rabin and Arafat's signing ceremony on the White House lawn.
Notice what bothers him about the Oslo Accords: "And how saddened we are that people whose sole goal is the eradication of religion are the ones who influence the government, and people who do not have the proper sense of responsibility for the existence of the Jewish people are the ones who speak and in whose hands are the decisions on serious matters. And in particular, the way of the current government that abounds in heresy and desecration of religion, which is what endangers the existence of the Jewish people and also causes assimilation and mixing with the Gentiles, and their decisions cannot be trusted.".
""And here, with sorrow and heartache, it is impossible to deny the obvious truth - to anyone who wants to see the truth - that the government's entire intention is for it to be a state like all other states, and it doesn't matter to them whether it is the people of Israel, but rather a free state without any connection with religion, and not with the past, like all the nations of the House of Israel.".
Only at the end of the letter, in the last paragraph, does he mention the security rationale and write about a hundred million Arabs who are growing stronger in the region and who wish for our destruction.
4.
Rabbi Schach defined the Likud as a party of "people of innocent faith." While the leftists "openly declare that they do not believe, that they disbelieve in everything," the rightists "pass on religion only as individuals, but in public they respect and give religious freedom.".
And Rabbi Avraham Ravitz, the most impressive spokesman for Haredi politics ever, explained: "In choosing between the two camps, we must reject other considerations that may be correct in themselves, and prefer the consideration of the general character of the masses that characterize both camps. In general, the right-wing camp is characterized as a traditional camp that respects the original values of Judaism and is connected to them, a camp that does not aspire to replace ancient Jewish culture with new culture, a camp that was also not a partner in the difficult struggles against the religiosity of immigrants in the early years of the state, a camp of warm, emotional, and simple Jews like us.".
Is Netanyahu more religious in his personal lifestyle than Lapid? Not sure. Benny Gantz, for example, is certainly closer to tradition personally. But the question here is not personal. The question is where the party, the bloc, wants to take the State of Israel. And here the answer is very clear. And after the last year - clearer than ever. You don't have to be Rabbi Schach to understand how great the danger is.
5.
And from the Haredi worldview, in a sharp transition to Prof. Asher Cohen.
Actually, it's not really a sharp transition. Following what I wrote here after Bennett's fall about Yamina representatives who didn't get confused and quit the party, Prof. Asher Cohen sent me the following. Cohen, let's remember, was the party's candidate for the Knesset who could have received lucrative jobs from Matan Kahane, but he courageously quit:
""Hello friends. Following your column, I dug back 13 months, to May 2021. Here is what I wrote to Bennett on May 5, 2021, just before the formation of the government:
Hello Naftali, here are some thoughts that consciously and intentionally avoid discussing what might happen from any practical perspective, but only from a symbolic and cognitive perspective. In terms of the symbolism of the left and the intended government of change.
The left in its current form is much more radical than before. Although the vast majority is Zionist, it is a silent majority that prefers to remain silent in the face of the loud and thunderous radical extreme. The radicals will not hold back and will accompany Netanyahu's exit from Balfour with dances, drums and cymbals. This symbolism will arouse many demons in the national camp, especially among the Likudniks, and will be deeply etched in memory. And this symbolism, backed up by photos and videos on social media, will be registered for many years to come in the name of the one who caused it...
Immediately afterwards, the list of symbolic moves by the radical left will begin to fill up. And the potential of these moves is enormous, precisely because of the need to cover up and justify sitting in a government headed by right-wingers:
Gilad Kariv will come to the Western Wall every Rosh Chodesh with a Torah scroll; Ebtisam Marana will shed a tear over the "massacre" in Tantura and mention the importance of the Nakba; Merav Michaeli will spout some anti-family gender nonsense; Nitzan Horowitz will move between denying conversion therapy, LGBT marriage, and the Hague Tribunal; Yair Golan will identify processes; and all this while leaning on Mansour Abbas.
"Even if none of this turns into any practical policy, it will be a symbolic accumulation of consciousness that will be overemphasized, both on the left and the right. And this atmosphere will be registered in the name of the one who is perceived by the public as having brought all this about, for the establishment of a government headed by him.".
6.
Wow. So much for this WhatsApp message, word for word, from a year and a half ago. One long message that simply predicted everything, step by step. In depth. A professor is better than a prophet.
I asked Prof. Cohen this week what Bennett answered him. After all, it's his candidate for the Knesset, a political science expert, who warns him against taking the prime ministership in an unfair way, who tells him what the moral significance of the wrongful act is and where it will lead. Cohen wrote to me: "He didn't answer.".
