The hareidim are on the ropes

By Ted Belman

Yair Ettinger, writing in Haaretz, reports:

When the prime minister and the heads of other parties are visiting protest tents, decrying the inequity in military service, when every politician is offering his own version of “military service for everyone,” when the agenda is yeshiva budgets, quotas for draft exemptions, participation in the labor force and discrimination against women – it is clear to the ultra-Orthodox that something has changed. There is hardly a single scenario in which the status of the Haredi parties in the new government will remain the same as it has been in the outgoing government. The most likely scenario is that in the next Knesset the ultra-Orthodox parties will be in the opposition.

Many pundits have suggested that Netanyahu will form his government by including Kadima and Yesh Atid. It seems to me that there is very little that divides them.

Betrayed by Bibi

The ultra-Orthodox are frustrated and they are angry deep in their hearts at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for having brought forward the elections without first reaching a temporary arrangement with them or burying the Tal law in some committee of experts. They think Netanyahu has betrayed them. However neither Shas not UTJ will say a bad word about Netanyahu in the next few months. They are thinking about the morning after the election. They still want Netanyahu to consider them as candidates for his coalition, even as excess baggage, the way Ehud Barak did in 1999.

Neverthyeless,

Though mass conscription probably will not happen in the foreseeable future, the Haredi elected representatives are anxiously anticipating other detrimental changes in the budgets for yeshivas and in the political status of the Haredi parties. The independent ultra-Orthodox newspaper Mishpaha recently declared solemnly: “The town is burning.”