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Haredi-Arab Partnership - The Ultimate Art of the Deal

Shalom Pollack

MKs Ya'akov Litzman and Muhammad Barakeh (Image credit: Avi Ohayon/Government Press Office of Israel)

Haredi MK Menachem Eliezer Mozes of the United Torah Judaism party recently revealed an unlikely partnership in the Knesset: “We're doing 'business' with the Arabs in order to support laws that are important to the Haredi public."

Speaking to Radio Kol Hai late last month, Mozes elaborated that the Haredi parties UTJ and Shas torpedoed the Muezzin Law - aimed at limiting the deafening volume of the Muslim call to prayer - so as to maintain this partnership with the Arab Joint List party, even though the Haredi parties supported a 2016 version of the bill.

While calling that earlier support a “mistake,” Mozes indicated that the Haredi opposition to the Muezzin Law was meant to get Arab support in the Knesset for a Draft Law giving Haredi yeshiva student army enlistment deferments.

The above is an actual admission made by Mozes in a real interview. Did it make you blink twice and rub your eyes to make sure they were not playing tricks on you?

Let us try to understand this. The Haredim, who are a generally non-Zionist "ultra-Orthodox" community, are making deals with the anti-Zionist Arab parties in the Knesset and proudly announce that an alliance has been struck.

You help make sure that our sons do not have to defend the country, and we will help you do what is dearest to you (weaken Israel as a Jewish country).

What can one say? I must choose my words carefully.

I usually save my harshest words for the Arab enemies who want us dead and the Leftists who support them. I believe it is the Jewish country that Leftists truly hate - as they do themselves - for being Jewish.

It is not difficult for me to paint the above with a rather wide and clear brush.

The Arabs hate us because we are Jews and the Left hate themselves and us because we are Jews. They suffer from a generationally recurring warped gene that stems from a continuing disconnect from Judaism.

I get it.

The Haredim are not Arabs - they do not hate Jews. They are firmly planted in the Jewish tradition, dress, liturgy, strict Shabbat and holiday observance, etc. - so they are definitely not Leftists in the classic sense. They don't talk like them or walk like them, but the Arabs are ready to embrace them just as they have the Leftists.

The difference is this: The Leftists are driven by an ideology that calls for abetting our enemies. The Haredim, on the other hand, don't love the Arabs, nor do they adapt their national narrative.

It's purely business. Nothing personal. Nothing ideological.

That explains why Shas voted for Oslo and UTJ voted for the expulsion from Gush Katif and Samaria. It's the ultimate art of the deal.

As far as the Haredim are concerned they could be wheeling and dealing with any political players in Brooklyn, New York; or Manchester, England; or Lublin, Poland - before those deals ended a few decades ago.

Non-Zionist means I live in my corner of this country (it can be any country or community, anywhere) and I do what is best for my corner. Period.

Two thousand years of Jewish dispersion, humiliation, and weakness were okay as long as there was a corner.

Just give me my corner. I don't need a Jewish country with its unfamiliar myriad types of Jews from every corner of the earth. I don't want an army and all the other nuisances that a real people must face. We never had to deal with this stuff in the ghetto. Just give me a goy with whom I can make deals and…stay out of my corner.

Many of the Jewish slaves who left Egypt quickly preferred to return to Egypt and not enter the Promised Land to deal with the responsibilities of a free responsible nation. They were the prototype.

I will continue to be woken up at 4:30 am by the blaring mosque loudspeakers. But I won't curse the Arabs any longer.