Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu Protest Agenda Aims at Judaism
Yair Lapid, who has formed a party to run in the next Knesset election, bares the truth of the protest agenda: a secular State of Israel
Lapid, whose later father Tommy Lapid headed the anti-religious Shinui party, claimed in an op-ed in the Yediot Aharanot newspaper Sunday that he represents Israel’s “largest minority.”
He claims his “majority,” meaning a plurality, “can now form alliances with other minorities. With the hareidim who happen to want to work, with the religious who don’t think that Judaism is all about a hill in Samaria, and with the Arabs who want to perform national service. “Israel’s secular majority finally fighting back, starting to behave like a minority group.”
His definition of “secular” apparently includes anyone who does not define himself as “religious” but includes what actually may be Israel’s real largest minority – Jews who define themselves as traditional, meaning they keep many Jewish laws and customs but are not strictly observant or secular.
However, Lapid argued that his minority of 42 percent is the largest majority in Israel. It “does not know how to join forces for the sake of its own interests,” according to Lapid.” The majority cannot afford to say ‘to hell with everything’; the majority does not hire lobbyists, does not set up NGOs that would work for its interests, and does not know how to press Knesset members from its sector, because it’s not a sector.”
Without noting left-wing activist groups such as the New Israel Fund, Yesh Din and Peace Now, Lapid moved on to attack nationalists, alleging that “the majority also cannot build an illegal home, on illegal land, and then fight with the police officers who come to evict it, because the majority has a nephew in the police and loves its nephew….
“The majority’s children are already in high school and one even finished his military service, yet his sister-in-law has two children in kindergarten and pays almost $1,000 per month. The majority looks at the minorities and knows that there’s no chance they are paying similar sums, because they wouldn’t be able to afford it. The majority isn’t jealous, but wonders who arranged this for them? Who arranged life so that their sister-in-law doesn’t pay the same as the majority’s sister-in-law?”
In fact, the national-religious community’s sons, proportionately represent the largest sector in the IDF, and the strictly secular community, as noted in statistics from secular high schools in metropolitan Tel Aviv and in secular kibbutzim, have a high rate of draft-dodging.
Lapid also charged that his “majority…is the only one that paid the full price” and that “all the others got some discount arranged…. They decided that G-d has to arrange a home on a hill for them for ideological reasons, with an ideological backyard.” He was referring to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, where the government’s official building freeze two years ago largely remains in effect unofficially.
Lapid, like his father, wants a State of Israel where Judaism is strictly a personal issue, a situation that is considered “secular coercion” by a large number of Israelis, both religious and traditional.
Meanwhile, Israel’s mainstream media continued on Sunday to promote the protest movement. Although even left-wing outlets such as Haaretz, reported that 150,000 people protested nationwide – without noting that nearly twice that number protests six years ago against the expulsions of Jews from Gush Katif – the Jerusalem Post went one step further and headlined that ”hundreds of thousands” people demonstrated.
The media also played down or ignored the appearance of uniformed IDF reservists at the protest against the cost of housing, education, food and just about everything else, blaming the Netanyahu government for the country’s age-old ails.
Previous political appearances by uniformed soldiers against expulsions of Jews and against the demolitions of Jewish homes have been met by harsh punishment, including eviction from combat units.
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