Yuli Edelstein, once a Soviet Prisoner of Zion, now a supporter of political arrests
He should have been at the forefront of support for the three women who placed ‘Let My People Go’ hostage flyers on the seats at his synagogue. Instead, he backed their detention
Shalom Yerushalmi is the political analyst for Zman Israel, The Times of Israel’s Hebrew current affairs website
Yuli Edelstein should have been proud of the form of protest chosen by the three women who were arrested on Friday after distributing flyers the previous day in the Herzliya synagogue where he prays.
Edelstein is front and center in the flyers, in a picture that dates from his days as a Prisoner of Zion in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and is surrounded by photographs of the female IDF surveillance soldiers who are still held hostage in Gaza — heroes of Israel, no less and possibly more than he.
All of them were soldiers on the front lines of the state who warned of the impending disaster.
Abducted to Gaza on October 7, the soldiers witnessed the horrible sights — the murders, the rapes — carried out by Hamas terrorists on that terrible day. And now they languish in Hamas tunnels and yearn for rescue, just as Edelstein did 40 years ago.
But Edelstein has a heart of stone.
“I give my full backing to the Israel Police and offer many words of thanks for the fact that, in addition to all their other tasks, they have come to protect me and the synagogue against various rioters,” he declared on Sunday.
Edelstein is backing the arrest of three women who expressed their protest in the most moderate and civil way possible. I am certain that if the demonstrators demanding the freedom of the Prisoners of Zion all those years ago had merely politely distributed flyers worldwide, Nathan Sharansky and Yuli Edelstein would still be wallowing in the Soviet gulag.
Edelstein offered not a word of criticism for the scandalous arrests, no empathy for the three protesters. This, after all, is the man who demanded of relatives of hostages who pursued him in the Knesset a few months ago to “get out my sight.”
Even the new police commissioner, Danny Levy, quickly realized that the arrests were inappropriate, after police officers were sent to cuff the women at their homes and take them to the Glilot police station.
Levy ordered that the circumstances of the arrests be looked into, and he made clear that lessons would be learned.
The Justice Ministry’s Department of Internal Police Investigations was yet more determined, and announced that it would question those involved. Even hardline Likud Knesset member Moshe Saada was shocked.
But Edelstein? He demanded that police protect him from the flyer-distributors and from demonstrators who accompanied him on Shabbat on his way to the synagogue.
“We’re on a slippery slope,” Edelstein said. “If we don’t set very clear boundaries for what is a demonstration and what is a protest, we will end up in bad places.”
Edelstein needs to be reminded that we’ve long since reached bad places, and that he helped send us down that slippery slope. In March 2020, Edelstein, who was then the speaker of the Knesset, refused to obey a Supreme Court order to convene the Knesset and choose a new speaker after a legal-parliamentary saga. He claimed at the time that the Supreme Court had harmed the Knesset’s sovereignty and resigned rather than carry out the court’s orders.
Ever since then, Edelstein has slipped further. A politician who once came in first in the Likud party primaries and was seen as a serious candidate to serve as president of Israel fell far down the party’s slate for the current Knesset. On his way there, he at one point announced that he would challenge Netanyahu for the Likud leadership, but quickly changed his mind.
Over the course of 2023 and again since October 7, Edelstein tried behind the scenes to arrange a constructive vote of no confidence in the government, suggesting himself as an alternative prime minister until elections were held. The effort failed because Likud refused to support his candidacy.
Edelstein used to be a dissident, a man of courage who served time in a Soviet jail, hunger-striking and insisting on his democratic right to fulfill his Zionist dream. Today, most unfortunately, he backs the political arrests of those demonstrating for the release of hostages who were abandoned by the Likud government. Perhaps he hopes to curry favor with Likud voters who have booted him from the party’s higher echelons.
It will be interesting to see whether Edelstein will also fold now on the central issue he is currently dealing with as chairman of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee: efforts to legislate a law to regulate the military draft of the ultra-Orthodox population.
Edelstein has promised that he will not back the return of blanket exemptions for Haredim — will not support the joke of a bill that is currently on the committee’s table. He has said he will only approve for final readings legislation that would genuinely lead to the recruiting of ultra-Orthodox to the IDF, a vital move given Israel’s security needs.
The pressure on Edelstein is considerable, mainly from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the ultra-Orthodox politicians. Judging by his dismal behavior over the weekend, the fear is that Edelstein will prove, once again, to have lost his principles.
Translated from the original Hebrew on ToI’s sister site Zman Yisrael.
