What kind of government will be formed after the next elections? Quite a few parties are ruling out sitting in a coalition with non-Zionist parties and sectors such as the Haredim and the Arabs - and this is preventing, at least according to the numbers, the formation of a potential government. Shvut Raanan, founder of the 'Reservists' Women's Forum', and political commentator Shari Roth from Haredim 10, discussed the composition of the next government and the boycotts within the people.
Amichai Atali: Listen, so yesterday in the 'Kan 11' poll, Likud is once again the largest party. On the other hand, the opposition has no majority without the Arab parties. Reuben Raanan, you were a dominant voice in these contexts of needing some change and replacement, but can we rely on RAAM, for that matter?
Shvut Raanan: I think we must get out of the political concept. We must stop with the boycotts and allow a broad Zionist government that will allow for both taking responsibility, both rehabilitation and making essential decisions - of a constitution, as if the rules of the game, all kinds of things that you cannot accept in any narrow government, and certainly not in governments that change on non-Zionist parties, who have other needs and that's fine and they deserve representation, but in the end we have to take responsibility for this house. And as we saw in the last government, you can't rely on such forces.
Amichai Atali: Minister, you probably hear, like all of us, over and over again this talk about a broad Zionist government and that non-Zionist parties cannot be relied on - where does this meet the Haredi sentiment and also yours personally, as if they don't want you in the next coalition...
Shvut: I don't want to, I don't want to lean...
Amichai: Yes, we don't want you to be part of the 61st. So come as the icing on the cake.
Sherry: I don't need to see polls to know that they don't want us and don't love us. I feel the hatred in their eyes...
Return: Wait, wow...
Amichai: Everyone speaks in their own time, after that you'll respond again...
Shvut: Okay, I'm just saying, let's not add hatred to the political mix... We can talk about the issue itself. And it doesn't necessarily talk about division.
Amichai: Wait, okay, Sherry...
Sherry: I'm just saying that I don't need polls to know what you're saying, that we're not wanted. I get hate messages personally, every day, all the time, I see the looks on the street, even if they don't say it - yes, I feel that when I leave my little territory in Modi'in Illit, I really feel it in my flesh. And that wasn't the case in previous years, by the way.
Ilail Shahar: Look, I'm sure it's hard to see the looks and receive hate messages, but you can understand what it's about... Reserve personnel, and it's hard for them...
Shari: Yes, yes, yes, I didn't say I didn't understand. Believe me, I sit among my people, and I know both sides, understand each side, and I can give you a two-hour lecture right now on why each side is right or thinks it is right. I'm just saying that in our people, in a people that was founded by people who came from the ruins, from all over the world, I wouldn't want it to be like that. I don't think Ben-Gurion saw the country like that in his mind.
So if I were to give reasons to hate, I could hate any minority in the nation and now explain with well-reasoned and beautiful explanations why. But it shouldn't reach these areas.
Ilail: No, not haters, this time, look there is racism and we don't turn a blind eye, but this time it's not racism. There's a reason the burden is on one side, and it creates difficulty, and it's a sense of inequality, and I can understand why people are angry about it.
Shari: Are people angry with the Arab public? It's not that the Arab public does bear the burden or is equal, and I don't see that the Arab public has so many hours of screen time to explain why they're wrong. Even, you know, the law doesn't talk about them. As if it's okay and it's okay that an Arab living in Kafr Qassem doesn't do military service, okay, he doesn't believe in the army and its values. Civilian service, just in the MDA, in the fire department - what's the problem with that? I don't see that being talked about at all.
Shvut: First of all, I really think there should be one law.
Sherry: Okay, but hardly anyone talks about it.
Shvut: Whoever wanted to make a law only for himself and his unique blood is not the general public...
Shari: Even in the government of change, they didn't try to make any other law that would recruit anyone who is Arab.
Shvut: I'm talking to you about now. During the war.
Shari: Lieberman is among the only voices talking about this. I don't hear it in the Knesset, not in the Democrats, and I'm at faction meetings, I don't hear anyone talking about this issue of the Arab public, which somehow gets mixed up in these issues of equality...
Amichai: This matter of Arab service is a bit of a smokescreen, with the Haredim saying time and time again, 'They don't serve'...
Sherry: That's the truth! Our country needs auxiliary forces, and they don't!
Ilail: But they won't go guarding the border and no one expects or wants them to guard the border and they won't serve in Syria, Lebanon, or Gaza...
Sherry: I didn't ask to guard the border, but when I go into health insurance funds and hospitals, I find Arab nurses, Arab doctors there, and that's fine and dandy. They can also be volunteer auxiliaries, three years of their lives, why what happened?
Ilail: Okay, we got it...
Sherry: I just now came across a post by a Jew named Liran Levy, I think he's religious-national, he has a knitted kippah on his head, he tells how his mother didn't feel well in the middle of the night, a day or a day and a half later she passed away, he got up from the 'sevening' now, and he tells that those who were there by her side in the moments when they needed to restore her pulse were 'parasite' Haredim, so it's not that Haredim don't volunteer...
Amichai: That's true, but we hear that the government is approving the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of reservists by the 31st...
Sari: This is a known problem, let's not dig into it again, I say to the political issue: as long as the Change Bloc, the Left Bloc, does not manage to embrace the Haredim and say, 'We will find a solution that will allow, not your parasites nor your scoundrels, but your Torah students, to study Torah quietly and without being arrested,' as long as this thing does not happen... and I do not hear it from Eisenkot or from anyone from the Change Bloc.
Amichai: Under what conditions, briefly if you can, under what conditions will you Haredim enter a government that is not Netanyahu's government?
Shari: One condition! One-one-one! And right now, both Gafni and Goldenoff, and you know what? I'll tell you a secret, including Deri, who right now, for the sake of the election campaign, is embracing Bibi, and 'Bibi needs a strong lion' and all that crap that needs to be pulled out of the mothballs - if they give them a conscription law in a way that they can eat it, not with draconian sanctions...
Amichai: Will the Haredim accept that everyone who doesn't study in a yeshiva will be drafted?
Shari: Basically, the law that Yuli Edelstein agreed to the night before the first attack on Iran, he brought a law, he hadn't written it yet, but he told them 'this will be the outline of the law,' they agreed to it. Then the 12-Day War came and he went back on it and made another law with fingerprints and things that they saw as humiliating. The Haredim today understand, after October 7th, that the combines are over and those who don't study have to do service, the army understands that it wants the Haredim, needs them and needs them and is ready to come to them with the 'Hashmonaim' and all sorts of things that it is preparing and doing today - that suit the Haredim. If it's 'Kodkud', 'Shachar', all these things.
Amichai: Again, do you accept this law 'outlined by Yuli Edelstein on the eve of the previous attack on Iran'?
Shvut: First of all, on the eve of the attack on Iran, this is a law that I stopped for the simple reason that it was a draft exemption law with no teeth, and I no longer have confidence in it, sorry, and even after everything we've heard, we also know why there's no confidence. And I need, like a lawyer, a law that the intentions that they want the law to express have teeth and the funds will only arrive after the goals are met and the incentives are personal.
Sherry: We're not talking about money now...
Shvut: No, it's all money...
Shari: No, no, no. The Haredim don't go out to protests over money.
Shvut: I listened for a long time, I would love to say a few sentences in a row. As far as I'm concerned, the thing that scares me the most is that the people of change, out of hatred for Bibi, will really sell out all the values, all the vital need for integration into Haredi society, and you've ignored the most dramatic statistic here: In the end, our Haredi brothers are almost 15% today, 25% in 6-10 years. It's no longer possible to have a spoiled child here, who grows up as if he's 3 years old when he's actually already 15 - and he has to take responsibility in this house, and soon be an adult who protects his own children.
This is the drama with the Haredi public, which I love, I have not a ounce of hatred for. But a spoiled child, whom we, I, including myself, gave the opportunity to grow up in autonomy and live on our backs both in terms of security and economically - and if we now do not change the incentives of the state to speak to him in a respectful, but responsible way, both on the economic level, both on the level of partnership and defense and, yes, on the level of education with tools for adults who can support their children - if we do not do it now, it will be very difficult to do it later.
Look at the Haredi political protectionism now in this government and you will understand how much worse it will be in successive governments. And what scares me is that the left and 'just not Bibi' will defeat this existential need that the State of Israel truly depends on.
