Shomer f*cking shabbos

The Sabbath is under attack and the ultra-Orthodox are up in arms, demanding the resignation of a minister and threatening a possible coalition crisis over the day of rest. It wouldn’t be the first time an Israeli government is brought down by Haredi parties over the seventh day, and on Sunday the newspapers channel Walter Sobchak of “The Big Lebowski.”

The coalition mini-crisis — instigated by the ultra-Orthodox parties in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, over construction work carried out on the train line in Tel Aviv on the Sabbath — is front-page material on Sunday in all three major dailies.

The work, planned months in advance, necessitated closing the southbound side of the Ayalon freeway, which police decided was most safely done on Saturday when traffic was at its lowest.

United Torah Judaism and Shas party ministers fumed over the works carried out on the Sabbath but were even more irate, reports Yedioth Ahronoth, over the fact that the construction teams used a drone to film the construction and publicize it, a move interpreted as rubbing it in the face of the religious.

The ultra-Orthodox parties demanded an urgent meeting with Netanyahu and issued a statement denouncing the “unnecessary work on the train in Tel Aviv” that “violated the Sabbath,” Haaretz reports. The paper quotes sources in the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party saying that the ministers would demand Netanyahu dismiss Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz over the affront to the holy day.

Yedioth has secular and ultra-Orthodoxs pundit argue the issue. Yaron London says that there’s a place for debate over the observance of the Sabbath in public life, but that it should be “free from extortion of governments constantly threatened by their ultra-Orthodox members.” The chief rabbi of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Yisrael Meir Lau, calls the discussion of letting stores open on the Sabbath in the country’s secular stronghold “a slippery slope.”

“Today: main streets; tomorrow: the whole city. Today: groceries; tomorrow: every type of store. Today: Tel Aviv-Jaffa; tomorrow: the entire State of Israel,” Lau writes. He portrays the issue as undermining family values. “My heart goes out to the thousands of children forced to separate from their fathers and mothers on their days off from school on Saturdays and holidays, because their parents go to work to fill the coffers of grocery owners, instead of spending quality time with their children.”

He does not seem to notice that one might, if one were so inclined, make the same argument in favor of rampant unemployment among Israel’s ultra-Orthodox population, Sabbath or not.

Yedioth Ahronoth also has an opinion piece in the back pages about how ultra-Orthodox Israelis take this period between Tisha B’Av and the High Holidays as vacation and actively force the exclusion of non-ultra-Orthodox Israelis from lodges in northern Israel, amusement parks, etc.

The author, Yifat Biton, says that whereas the growing inclusion of ultra-Orthodox in public life is welcome, “the trend of duplicating the separation from the Haredi sphere to the public sphere, and the exclusion of those who aren’t Haredi from it, must be eradicated.”

Shockingly Haaretz, that bastion of secular freedoms, is mum on the issue even though it had several days to concoct a scathing rebuke of the ultra-Orthodox for hijacking Israeli public life. Perhaps the prospects of Netanyahu’s government falling over a spat between the prime minister’s Likud party and his ultra-Orthodox allies outweigh outrage over religious fundamentalism.

Israel Hayom leads with its usual back-to-school drivel: Oh look, triplets have survived long enough to make it to the first grade. A miserable bunch of Israeli parents are packed into an overcrowded store trying to buy overpriced school supplies. It’s incredible that the editors of the paper even thought this was newsworthy, let alone deserving of prominence over an Israeli company facilitating the hacking of the cellphones of journalists and human rights activists or the IDF killing an unarmed Palestinian for apparently no reason.

When it does bother to get around to the ultra-Orthodox outrage over the desecration of the Sabbath, its pundit Yehuda Shlezinger downplays the whole affair and says that the religious parties are far from bolting from the government. In exchange for allowing construction on the Sabbath, they get exemptions from mandatory army service, he cites Netanyahu explaining to ultra-Orthodox journalists last week. Violations of the Sabbath brought down the government once, but today the ultra-Orthodox parties have a lot more at stake, he says. The question is whether the ultra-Orthodox politicians will be able to withstand pressure from their constituents over compromising on the issue of the Sabbath.

The second main front-page story in Haaretz is Friday’s West Bank incident in which IDF soldiers shot dead an apparently unarmed Palestinian man who posed no threat to their safety. The paper reports that it isn’t clear what the soldiers found so threatening that they opened fire on the man. The paper’s pundit Gideon Levy calls the incident “murder” because the Kfir Brigade soldiers saw 38-year-old Iyad Hamed as “subhuman.”

The incident is completely ignored in the tabloids. Why care about another IDF soldier killing a Palestinian while there’s still one on trial for manslaughter?