As its leader Deri fights for his political life, Shas teeters with him

Aryeh Deri is a broken man. Or, at least, he’s spent the past two weeks trying to convince us that he is.

It all began with the revelation of some compromising video tapes two weeks ago. They were not the sorts of videos that might doom less-pious politicians, but they were no less humiliating for the Shas leader. In them, Shas’s late founder, religious hero and political mentor Rabbi Ovadia Yosef is seen telling his son Moshe Yosef in a 2008 conversation between the two that he does not trust Deri and does not want him restored as head of Shas.

To the outside world, Deri’s 1999 conviction for corruption marks the worst blight on his public record. But within the ranks of Shas, he is burdened by a different anxiety, the widely known but rarely discussed tensions between himself and Yosef. The combination of Deri’s political wiles and Yosef’s outstanding scholarly reputation had established Shas as a stable political force that brought pride and power over the past 30 years to a substantial section of the Sephardi electorate. But it was long whispered in Shas that the great master often worried that Deri was becoming the more popular of the two, and that Deri allowed himself to act against Yosef’s wishes.

In 2013, shortly before his death, Yosef restored Shas to the hands of Deri, replacing the party’s steward for the previous 13 years, Eli Yishai. Yishai was silent on the matter as long as Yosef lived. But Yosef did not live long, dying in October 2013 at the age of 93. After Yosef’s death, relations between Deri and Yishai deteriorated steadily, until they ruptured dramatically last month, leading Yishai to withdraw from Shas and found his own party, a party whose every ad and campaign banner are graced with the face or words of the late Yosef.

Deri did the only thing he could do. He resigned

For Deri, then, the political danger of the Yosef videos was mortal. As Shas under him fell as low as five seats (from the current 11) in multiple polls, often equaling the showing of Yishai’s nascent competing party, he suddenly faced the stark reality that the gravest challenge to his right to rule Shas was coming not from Yishai, but from the late master himself.

And so Deri did the only thing he could do. He resigned.

He announced his resignation in a letter to Shas’s Council of Torah Sages, the three-member committee that serves as the rabbinic leadership of the party. When it was chaired by Yosef, the Council was a mighty institution whose word was law in the party. But without Yosef, the remaining figures are almost entirely unknown to the electorate, including many former Shas voters.

Deri’s move was bold and brilliant. After the loss of both Yishai and Yosef in swift succession, it was immediately obvious to Shas’s rabbis, MKs and activist base that Deri was the party’s last best hope for fielding an electable Knesset slate — just two and a half months before an election.

And so the day after Deri’s resignation announcement, the council released a statement insisting, ordering — in effect, begging — that he withdraw his resignation.

But Deri refused. He could not in good conscience continue the fight against Yishai (whom he blamed for the video’s leak) if it came at the expense of the memory of the holy Rav Ovadia.

“The pain that pierced my heart yesterday was worse than when Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, of blessed memory, died,” Deri wrote. “The heart is torn in light of the terrible desecration of God’s name, the contempt for the Torah and the insult to our teacher’s honor.”

Pyrrhic victories?

Good politicians are also good political analysts. But there is a fundamental difference between the politician and the analyst. The politician must act.

Deri is famously one of the best political analysts Israel has ever known. And, faced with the devastating footage aired before the entire country on Channel 2 television’s prime-time evening news, Deri acted.

His resignation garnered all the media attention he could have wished for, dominating national headlines for two days.

The fact that he did it without rhetoric or dramatic flourish, and let others, namely Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein, release footage of him signing his resignation papers from the Knesset on December 30, left skeptical journalists wondering aloud if he really meant it. Tellingly, he did not actually quit Shas.

Deri’s move put Yishai on the defensive for the first time. It is the likely reason that Shas rose a seat or two in the polls over the weekend, and it coincided with Yishai’s party dropping below four seats.

Besides insisting that he had not leaked the video, Yishai was forced to explain last week that his party was founded to prevent another Oslo peace process and “protect the land of Israel” — a dig at Deri, who led Shas in the 1990s to abstain in Knesset votes on the Oslo peace accords, allowing the accords to win parliamentary approval. And it was also a reference to part of the released Yosef videos in which Ovadia says he had gone along with the Oslo votes at Deri’s insistence, insisting he (Yosef) did not fully understand the issue.

Now cast as the villain in the morality play gripping the party he had just left, Yishai tried to deflect to the major point of substantive disagreement between him and Deri: the peace process.

But Deri had successfully made his point, and it was this: Without him Shas could be crushed, and may fail to enter the Knesset entirely. That wouldn’t be a loss for Shas alone. The entire ultra-Orthodox camp in the Knesset, including the Ashkenazi party United Torah Judaism, would be cut in half, endangering their shared agenda.

He sacrificed nothing but appeared to sacrifice everything. He resigned from the Knesset, but not from Shas

So even as Yishai played down Deri’s grandstanding, Yishai’s own rabbinic mentor, Rabbi Meir Mazuz, who left Shas to go with Yishai, wrote an impassioned letter urging Deri to backtrack from his resignation. “Our hands did not spill this blood,” Mazuz wrote of the leaked videos, employing religious imagery that recalled the Talmud’s equating of public shaming with murder.

And the Ashkenazi party, too, including MKs Yaakov Litzman and Moshe Gafni, urged Deri not to “harm the entire camp” because of his “pain.”

Deri’s move was brilliant. He sacrificed nothing but appeared to sacrifice everything. He resigned from the Knesset, but not from Shas. While he is no longer a Knesset member, he is still legally permitted to lead the party’s Knesset list in the March 17 elections.

There is a deadline for his return, however. By January 29, all parties who wish to compete in the March elections must submit their Knesset slates to the Central Elections Commission. Deri can only be said to have quit politics if his name is missing from the Shas list submitted that day. There is no reason to think that will be the case. In a Channel 2 interview broadcast on Sunday night, Deri noted: “A man who does not change his mind and does not listen to the will of others is not a real man, he is an ass.”

Meanwhile, at the cost of just two months’ salary partly offset by his Knesset severance package, he has driven home to allies and enemies alike his electoral indispensability.

The limits of Deri’s brinkmanship

Yet these victories do not come without a cost.

While UTJ is desperate not to lose Shas from the Knesset, Deri’s campaign has generated pushback in the Ashkenazi party over the calls for a “public embrace” of the Shas leader.

When he left Shas, Eli Yishai let it be known that he had received the blessing of Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteinman, a leading figure in the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox world. As part of his campaign, Deri has sought Shteinman’s blessing as well, in the form of a call issued from the Ashkenazi sage for his return.

But sources in the Degel Hatorah party, one of the two political parties that make up the UTJ list, suggested to Israel National News last week that this demand was generating resentment in UTJ.

“We calculate that [Deri] will return with us or without us…. Either way, the path to a call for his return from Rabbi Shteinman is long. We don’t work for Deri. I don’t see it happening so quickly, if at all,” a party official said.

Even in Shas, the campaign to embrace Deri is in full swing, but it is not without its discordant notes and thinly veiled criticism.

Last week, Shas’s representatives in municipal councils nationwide wrote a letter praising Deri’s decades of public service and emphasizing Yosef’s love and appreciation for him.

But the letter’s conclusion was less fawning.

“Are you willing to throw away the life work of the master, the glory of the generation? … Do you wish in one push and fell swoop to topple the life work of tens of thousands of the sons of Sefarad?” the municipal council members asked.

There is a difference between urging Deri to return, insisting he is indispensable — and blaming him for a possible collapse. The letter crossed that line, albeit briefly and well away from the eyes of the media.

The collapse of Shas might mean the permanent loss of government subsidies for its Sephardi ultra-Orthodox schools, religious seminaries and countless other institutions. While they agreed to play along with Deri’s political brinksmanship, the Shas rank and file are telling him in no uncertain terms that his game is also profoundly selfish.

The desperate gambit seems to have worked. Deri seems to have survived the release of the Yosef videos by forcing his party to contemplate its ballot-box chances without him.

But in the process, Deri also discovered the limits of his influence and support. He would not be lionized by the Ashkenazi leadership. Eli Yishai would not break or lose the support of Rabbi Mazuz, even as the latter urged Deri to remain. And Deri’s apparent willingness to gamble with the future of Shas raised hard questions among the party’s rank and file about his priorities.

For the moment, he can still argue that his faux-resignation was important to force the party to focus on its priorities in a time of dire crisis: to defeat Yishai, rally in the face of the Yosef videos’ “desecration” of the old master’s memory, and ultimately to win votes at the ballot box in March.

But Deri will not be able to make this argument indefinitely. It is ironic that the greatest danger for Deri within his own base is that they might begin to believe he truly intends to resign. All understand the need to play the game that might save a troubled party, but none want to be left begging for the return of a man who might throw away so much in his overeager political maneuvers.

Having driven away Yishai and facing the brutally public spectacle of his past tensions with Yosef airing on national television, Deri’s challenge is now immense. He must show not only that he can save Shas from oblivion, but that the trust and public support he forced out of his party was justified. He must, against all odds, bring success.