JERUSALEM — What’s new in Israel?
Not much.
Our hourly news is about Coronavirus. How many new infections? Severe cases? Those put on breathing facilities? Deaths? Lots of commentary about the disease.
In one respect the news is good. The recent closures have reduced daily infections below 2,000 and even below 1,000.
However, we’re still plagued with questions. In short, the Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox.
Unknown numbers of them decline to be tested. Many of them say that the concern with Coronavirus is exaggerated. They go their own way with respect to opening schools and gathering for weddings, funerals, and other occurrences. Occasionally the police interfere, and provoke allegations about brutality. From pictures taken by the police it appears that those claims are false.
For the most part, it appears that the police avoid tussling with the Haredim.
So the data reported on the hourly news is suspect. If things are getting better, that is less true in the Haredi communities.
In any case, the closure has been lifted, to a large extent. Nursery schools are back in session, and limitations on travel from home have been lifted.
Decisions take hours to be reached, with intense discussion and efforts of Haredi politicians to make things better for their communities.
Our personal life is somewhere over the border of boring. One day is like the last, and so far like the next. An early morning walk, then hours to an evening walk. We’re keeping up with body tone, but except for people met along the way not seeing or speaking to many. Kids and grandkids by telephone. Now with the relaxation of the closure, we’re getting to see family members.
We hear of decisions allowing this and that, sometimes in great detail about the opening of nursery schools and the lower grades. It includes information about the neighborhoods and towns of the Haredim, but we don’t expect those details to be honored in anything like a thorough manner. One of their major rabbis has ruled that their schools must open. Despite government decisions against that.
And more on the US election, where one of the candidate’s physicians gave what sounds like a bill of health, but we can doubt the candor. And the other, with a frozen face looking like it’s filled with botox does his best to be the worthy opponent.
Polls favor Biden. But we’re concerned about Trump accepting the results. He’s even said that he’ll leave the country if he loses.
Here a majority of those polled say that Bibi should step down. Due to the problems of disease not handled well, with the overhang of corruption.
Who’d replace him?
Naftali Bennett seems the most popular, but we’re still a ways from an election. And there are several committed Likudniks speaking forcefully in Bibi’s behalf.
Bibi Netanyahu has claimed that the lockdown was a great success in reducing infections. That has brought sharp responses from antagonists severely critical of Netanyahu for caving into political pressures, especially from the Haredim. Notable here are decisions allowing an opening of primary schools in heavily infected neighborhoods, and more or less allowing a full opening of Yeshivot in those areas.
Areyah Deri has often been a source of Sepharadi Haredi pressure, urging accommodation among the Haredim. Now, however, he seems to have shifted and is taking a firm posture on Netanyahu, demanding an opening of weddings and other ceremonies for up to 200 participants, and siding with a Sephardi Haredi family against the police on a recent incident of family violence against police efforts to disperse a large wedding party.
We’re hearing more from Haredi spokesmen, supporting their senior Rabbis who are ruling that there must be an opening of the Yeshivot, where hundreds of young men gather closely in closed halls and are sure to be passing infections along with their disputes over religious literature.
For them, the incidence of infection is the price to be paid for the continued communal learning and other behaviors. They use terms including “anti-Semitism” against politicians who want to control them, and they dispute the seriousness of the Coronavirus disease.
There’s enough power in the Haredi communities to force Bibi and his close supporters to accept their demands, and to urge the police to go easy on them.
Until the spread of Coronavirus, it was a problem of finance. They’ve held up the government for welfare payments to Yeshiva students for a lifetime of study, housing subsidies, and a break on taxes. Now it’s become the addition of disease in their communities, and their unwillingness to recognize the threat and to deal with it.
The population has spread throughout Jerusalem. More than 30 percent of the city being Haredi. Our nearby neighborhood of Ramat Eshkol has been identified as highly infected. That includes the site of our own clinic and pharmacy, so we wonder about the care available to us.
Bibi’s problem is that he is the prime decider. And he gives in to pressures. Close this, open this. It’s impossible to justify what he does, often at odds with the committees of professionals in finance and medicine.
Behind it all is his concern for the judicial process. The government talked for hours about allowing or disallowing demonstrations. Finally it decided to allow them only a kilometer from one’s home.
So there were dozens of demonstrations, perhaps with greater totals than had earlier assembled near his homes.
Now the limit on demonstrations has been lifted, and thousands gathered near his official residence.
Bibi’s declaration of success led to an early withdrawal from the lockdown. And allowing who knows what to the Haredim. Experts are predicting an additional lockdown, when the daily infections leap from what is said to be less than 2,000 to something much higher.
There’s also confusion about what’s allowed with respect to nursery schools and the early grades of primary schools.
Teacher organizations are complaining. Do they only want more money, or are they worried about infection?
We’ll see.
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Ira Sharkansky, Ph.D, is professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University. He may be contacted via ira.sharkansky@sdjewishworld.com