Ultra-Orthodox parties battle to keep their voters from switching to Ben Gvir

For the two ultra-Orthodox political parties this election, one concern has stuck out above all else as their overriding fear and central source of electoral anxiety: the loss of voters to the far-right Religious Zionism party.

An election campaign ad posted to social media on Thursday by the ultra-Orthodox Shas party illustrated this disquiet beautifully.

In the ad, a traditional, yet secular young Mizrachi man, supposed to typify the average Shas voter, walks into a voting booth and — hand wavering between the Likud, Shas, and Religious Zionism voting slips — eventually decides to vote for the latter.

Suddenly Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the late spiritual leader and founding father of Shas, appears before the young man from beyond the grave and, by means of spliced archival video footage, admonishes him for even thinking about voting for any other party other than Shas.

The rabbi tells him only Shas will protect the country’s Jewish character and the poor, and promises him a place in the ‘World to Come’ if he votes for the ultra-Orthodox party.

Speaking reverentially to the departed rabbi, the man apologizes and happily votes Shas, blessing God’s name as he leaves the voting booth.

Ahead of the upcoming election, the two ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, have broken from tradition and declined to offer up their usual fare of dire warnings about the impending spiritual doom of the Jewish state should the right-wing, religious political bloc fail to be elected.

Instead, both parties have focused heavily on their aforementioned fear of losing votes to Ben Gvir, as well as the cost of living crisis which has badly affected the economically vulnerable ultra-Orthodox public.

Both parties have repeatedly decried the ongoing rise in the cost of food, as well as sky-high property prices and the growing cost of utilities, and made addressing such concerns a central part of their election platform.

The reasoning for this change in strategy is, simply put, because these are the two issues, which concern the average Haredi voter in Israel’s current economic and political climate.

Blaming the government for the cost of living crisis

“The Haredi community is interested in the cost of living, in the cost of education, the same kind of issues that are of concern to everyone else,” says Benny Rabinowitz, a prominent ultra-Orthodox journalist who was formerly a senior official in Degel Hatorah and a spokesman for the late ultra-Orthodox leader Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteinman.

A low-income community with a high rate of poverty and families with large numbers of children, the ultra-Orthodox public has felt the rise in the cost of food and consumer goods keenly, Rabinowitz notes.

Because of this financial vulnerability, Rabinowitz says the Haredi parties have sought to leverage the cost of living crisis to their benefit, and blame it squarely on the current government as a way of boosting voter motivation by underlining the supposed negative impact the actions of the outgoing administration has had on their lives — despite rising food costs around the world due to global inflation.

A recent UTJ campaign video released on social media shows ultra-Orthodox men in a grocery store sighing heavily at the high price of the goods, followed by UTJ chairman Yitzhak Goldknopf listing a series of suggested remedies to Israel’s economic woes.

The campaign ad pointedly shows the men in the grocery store bemoaning the cost of disposable plastic tableware and soft drinks.

The outgoing government raised taxes significantly on both these items, which are widely used and consumed in the ultra-Orthodox community, leading to accusations that the government was maliciously targeting the Haredi public.

UTJ has promised to annul these taxes and Goldknopf repeated that message in the video.

Shas and its leader, MK Aryeh Deri, have stressed similar themes, lambasting the outgoing government for its management of the economy.

One recent Shas campaign video even manages to address the cost of living crisis, the party’s right-wing credentials, and its commitment to the Netanyahu political bloc in one ad.

The video shows Deri in front of a list of all the political parties, slowly eliminating the ones which he thinks his voter base should disregard. Deri suggests first to “remove the parties which aren’t Jewish,” referring to the Arab parties Ra’am, Hadash-Ta’al, and Balad, and faintly mimicking the far-right’s antagonism to the Arab political leadership.

Then go all the parties that supposedly aren’t right-wing, including all the parties of the current coalition, while last to go are those which Deri says are not “socially minded” — meaning they are supposedly less committed to social welfare programs, including all the parties of the opposition, save for Shas.

“Triple Shas — Jewish, right-wing, and social-minded” the ad declares following Deri’s political summation.

Tacking right

During the course of the campaign, Deri has repeatedly denounced the government’s handling of Palestinian terrorism with much higher frequency than ever before and with more explicitly-right wing language than in the past.

And Moshe Gafni, head of the Degel Hatorah party which is one of two constituent factions within UTJ, has sought to dispel lingering suspicions that he has left-wing inclinations by emphasizing how he has never joined a left-wing government.

The ultra-Orthodox parties’ anxiety about being seen as insufficiently right-wing stems from the strong appeal the far-right Otzma Yehudit party headed by MK Itamar Ben Gvir and running on a joint list with the Religious Zionism party has for many Haredi voters, especially among the younger generations.

This attraction has several causes, including increasing ethnocentrism in the community and the religiously held belief of the elevated status of the Jewish people as the chosen people; the increasing nationalist sentiment among young ultra-Orthodox men; and Ben Gvir’s charisma — which contrasts starkly with the staid, somber demeanor of the mainstream ultra-Orthodox politicians.

Menny Geira Schwartz, a former editor of the ultra-Orthodox new website B’Hadrei Haredim and a strategic communications adviser, says that although Shas will see some loss of its religiously-traditional, working class Mizrachi voters to Ben Gvir’s party, UTJ should be equally if not more worried.

UTJ has more of an image problem than Shas in terms of its right-wing bona fides, says Geira Schwartz, alluding to senior figures such as Gafni, who in 2017 stated that regarding the conflict with the Palestinians he was “closer to the positions of the left-wing.”

Geira Schwartz estimates that as much as 10 percent of the ultra-Orthodox vote will go to Religious Zionism, a possibility that is surely giving Gafni and Deri sleepless nights.

And the two leaders’ battle to shore up their voting base by tacking right-wards has spilled over into internecine fighting between them.

The Israel Hayom newspaper reported that Gafni recently cut off communications with Deri after accusing him of holding hostile media briefings aimed at labeling the UTJ MK as left-wing.

And earlier this month, Gafni struck out against Deri by openly referring to Shas’s decision — under Deri’s leadership — to refrain from blocking the Oslo Accords when the agreement came to a vote in the Knesset.

Dr. Gilad Malach, director of the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel Program at the Israel Democracy Institute, adds that the Haredi parties are vulnerable to losing support to Ben Gvir since the younger voters in particular believe they can get a three-in-one deal from his party.

Religious Zionism is religiously extremely conservative, similar to the Haredi parties, and is also supportive of stipends for full-time yeshiva study, ongoing financial support for the ultra-Orthodox educational system, and the other financial needs of the community.

Since Ben Gvir is the ultimate ultra-nationalist — against whom Deri and Gafni pale by comparison — many young ultra-Orthodox voters see Religious Zionism as a great option in these elections.

The level of Shas’s panic over the transfer of its support to Ben Gvir’s party, which is soaring in the polls, peaked on Thursday night when it brandished its doomsday weapon invoking the authority and appeal of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.

At the same time, UTJ’s campaign to shore up its vote also crescendoed with its own rabbinical imprecations against voting for Religious Zionism.

Light on the spiritual doom

Notably absent from the Haredi parties’ campaigning has been references to the many controversies over religion and state which have beset the country for years, and which the ultra-Orthodox parties traditionally exploit for electoral capital.

Rabinowitz said that the awareness of the general Haredi public over such issues — be it public transportation on Shabbat or concerns over non-Orthodox conversion — is not high, adding that public transportation on Shabbat increased dramatically during the decade of Netanyahu’s rule.

The outgoing government made very few changes on key religion and state issues.

It failed to implement the Western Wall agreement, got nowhere near passing an ultra-Orthodox enlistment law, did not pass legislation allowing for public transportation on Shabbat, and did not even consider passing civil marriage legislation.

The one reform which was passed, liberalizing the kashrut licensing market, was widely denounced at the time, but lacks the heft of the more fundamental issues relating to religious life in Israel.

In such a benign atmosphere, pushing the message that the Jewish character of the state is under threat would have been a hard sell.

That is not to say that the ultra-Orthodox political parties will not address these concerns if they return to being part of the governing coalition.

Just this week, Gafni told the Galei Yisrael radio station that a condition of entry into the government for his party would be an agreement to pass a High Court override law allowing the Knesset to easily re-legislate a law struck down by the High Court of Justice.

In 2017, the High Court struck down the state’s arrangement allowing ultra-Orthodox men to legally avoid military service for the third time in two decades, ruling the existing statute violated the principle of equality before the law.

No new law has been passed since then, owing largely to the country’s political paralysis, but Gafni and other ultra-Orthodox politicians seek to enact a High Court override to prevent it from interfering in the highly sensitive issue of Haredi IDF enlistment.

Gafni and other Haredi leaders also seek a High Court override to circumvent a ruling from March last year granting the right to citizenship for converts who underwent Jewish conversion with the Reform or Masorti (Conservative) movements in Israel.

The ruling enraged the ultra-Orthodox parties and Gafni and others vowed at the time to enact a High Court override law specifically to deal with this issue.

Will they, won’t they?

Israel’s fifth election in three years is once again poised on a knife edge, with the pro-Netanyahu bloc just shy of a bare majority according to the polls and the anti-Netanyahu bloc struggling to gain enough seats to block the former premier from taking power again.

This being the fifth time around, and with the country in ongoing political disarray, speculation has mounted as to whether one or both of the ultra-Orthodox parties might be willing to join a government headed by National Unity Party leader Benny Gantz.

Gantz has certainly courted the Haredi parties and declined to attack them or advance policies that might antagonize them.

Earlier this year, before the government collapsed, there were even reports of negotiations between Gantz and the ultra-Orthodox parties to form a new government with the Likud but headed by Gantz, without going to elections.

Gafni and other UTJ MKs even visited the home of Rabbi Gershon Edelstein, the spiritual leader of the Degel Hatorah party, to ask him whether such a coalition would be acceptable. The rabbi reportedly did not oppose it.

Geira Schwartz noted that building such a government would face enormous political obstacles, and would have to include Likud and exclude Yesh Atid in order to make it feasible for the ultra-Orthodox leadership and public.

He said however that there was a chance the ultra-Orthodox parties would agree to such an arrangement, citing Gafni’s earlier willingness to entertain the idea.

“Gafni will go to Rabbi Edelstein and tell him ‘let’s try and get what we can,’ this will absolutely happen and there will be a debate about it.”