Netanyahu’s plea for ‘patience’ over Western Wall crisis is disingenuous
Op-ed: The prime minister travels the world trying to woo friends for Israel. Doesn’t he care about losing the Jews?
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).

On Tuesday, The Times of Israel published the full text of the Western Wall compromise agreement, an extraordinary document hammered out over years of meetings and site visits that was designed to insure, now that the “main” Western Wall is de facto controlled by ultra-Orthodox Judaism, that non-Orthodox Jews would have a guaranteed right to pluralistic prayer at an alternative Western Wall space nearby. This agreement, which provides for six non-Orthodox representatives appointed by the prime minister to sit on a 13-member oversight council, runs to a frankly staggering 15,000 words, and constitutes a patently well-intentioned effort by the parties involved to reconcile profound sensitivities at the heart of the intra-Jewish relationship.
So long and so serious in its construction, this is the agreement, solemnly approved by the government of Israel in January 2016, that was tossed aside by that same government by a casual show of hands, in a vote that was not even on the cabinet agenda, on Sunday, June 25.
A week and a half later, there has been backtracking on a second incendiary decision approved that day, with the shelving for six months of legislation that would have cemented the ultra-Orthodox monopoly on conversions to Judaism in Israel. But regarding the crisis over the broken Western Wall compromise, no such headway has been made.
Evidently, it is not a sufficient priority for the prime minister. That’s nothing short of a Jewish tragedy.
In an interview with this writer last week, Natan Sharansky, the Jewish Agency chairman who played an integral role in formulating the agreement, assessed that a formula would yet be found to enable its implementation. But he was far from certain that the trust between the Israeli leadership and the Diaspora representatives who worked so diligently on the accord could be restored.
He’s right to be worried. Indeed, I fear that the damage is graver still, and extends far beyond the shocked Diaspora leaders who believed — falsely, as it turned out — that the Israeli government’s word was its bond.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — he who initiated this entire Western Wall agreement project, and he who so recklessly cast it aside — pleaded on Monday night for “patience and perseverance” to resolve the crisis, and insisted that he remains “committed to making every Jew feel at home in Israel, including at the Kotel [Western Wall].”
But Netanyahu’s credibility lies in tatters. It was patience and perseverance that produced the elusive compromise; haste and irresolution destroyed it.
It may be routine for him — indeed it is routine in the rough and tumble of politics, in Israel and beyond — to twist and turn and backtrack, to make promises and then to break promises. But the Western Wall compromise was not seen by those who labored to formulate it as akin to a short-term policy pledge or coalition deal. For the leaders of the various streams of Judaism, representing millions of Jews, this was an agreement with the government of the homeland of the Jewish people that went to the heart of their Jewish identity.

Some of them may have feared it. Indeed, some of them did fear it. But they did not truly expect to be treated like a rival domestic political party, a potential coalition partner to be unceremoniously brushed away when narrow calculations changed.
Sharansky said he didn’t think Netanyahu’s coalition would have collapsed had the agreement been upheld. I’m sure he’s right; the prime minister could have called the ultra-Orthodox parties’ bluff. I imagine he wanted to demonstrate his commitment to the ultra-Orthodox parties, even if immediate coalition realities would have enabled him to face them down, in order to insure they wouldn’t be tempted to go seeking alternative partners among his numerous right-wing rivals. All such considerations are not the point, however.
Netanyahu and his government had given their word to the Jewish people. Israel had given its word.

In reneging, this prime minister — who commendably flies far and wide to build new friendships for Israel with world leaders, and who will rightly spend hours this week accompanying India’s visiting Prime Minister Narendra Modi — risks losing part of our own tiny global Jewish family. Surely that alliance, that intra-Jewish alliance, should be of paramount importance for the leader of the world’s only Jewish state.
We Jews have always been an internally divided bunch. That joke about two Jews, three synagogues is wryly amusing because it contains more than a kernel of truth. We are an argumentative people. A questioning people. A tribal people from the Biblical start. In Israel, with the luxury of a Jewish majority, we’ve allowed ourselves to become an internally intolerant people, dismissive of each other and of our approaches to our faith, aggressively critical of each other in ways that Diaspora Jews would denounce and protest were they treated similarly by their governments.
And we’ve allowed a dangerous mix of religion and state to flourish: Political power has enabled an increasingly dogmatic and narrow-minded ultra-Orthodox doctrine to tighten a stranglehold on birth, marriage, divorce, death, and now even prayer.

“The State of Israel is the only place in the Western world where Jews do not have freedom of religion,” Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid said in a 2013 speech to Diaspora leaders in Jerusalem. With the government of Israel having now spurned its own agreed-upon compromise on pluralistic worship at Judaism’s holiest place of prayer, because it dared not face down ultra-Orthodox politicians who forbid any notion of formal status for non-Orthodox religious Judaism, that dire summation by Lapid is hard to deny.
For years, when speaking about Israel, at home and abroad, and being faced with questions and criticisms from within the tent, I’ve often answered by acknowledging that of course we’re going to disagree about things this country does. How could it be otherwise? And I’ve advocated that, as lovers of Israel who care about this precious country, their obligation, our obligation, is to redouble efforts to make it the best Israel we can, and to focus on those areas where we think we can make a difference. (That sounds bland, I know, but it’s a kind of working-start overview, and from there you can progress to the nitty-gritty.)
That advice does not resonate across the board among Diaspora Jews, and emphatically not among self-perceived liberal Jews. There are some who, watching the latest government capitulation to the ultra-Orthodox, will indeed redouble their efforts for a pluralistic Israel. (If they moved here in their millions, of course, they’d certainly win.) Others though, increasingly troubled by Israel’s direction, will consciously or subconsciously take a step or two back — rethink their philanthropy, take a holiday somewhere else next year, keep quiet where they might previously have spoken up on Israel’s behalf. And still others will become more vocally critical, destructively so — leaving the tent.
The Western Wall dispute is a watershed moment. It’s a catastrophe, not a hiccup. Having promised the most marginal, limited, nonthreatening legitimacy for non-Orthodox streams of Judaism, the sovereign state of the Jews betrayed that promise.
I fear we will look back upon this episode with the deepest dismay and regret, as a moment when Jewish masses overseas started to shift — when those who were hitherto supporters moved across into the ranks of those who keep quiet, and when some of those who were previously silent became strident critics.
Several times in the past few days I’ve heard people I know well, people who have demonstrated their love for this country, saying things like “Israel’s losing me.”
Good riddance? To hell with them anyway?
No, I don’t think so. Our loss.
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Thank you,
David Horovitz, Founding Editor of The Times of Israel