On Israeli Politics

Anyone who has followed this blog and follows Israeli politics can realize that my views jive with the Ichud Leumi.  There is no other parliamentary party which represents those ideas as much as they do.  Nonetheless, I voted for the Likud, as I did in the last elections.  Obviously I did not do this due to any great love and admiration for Binyamin Netanyahu.  Rather, for years I have been a supporter of the ideology of Manhigut Yehudit.

One of the main ideas is that in order to achieve our ideological goals, we must strive for no less than the national leadership, and to do that, we must enter and compete for the leadership of the largest nationalist party, the Likud.  The only way to guarantee influence in the Likud is to be in it.  To illustrate, there is nothing stopping the Likud today from leaving the Ichud Leumi out of the government, and indeed Bibi can even set up a government with left-wing parties.  The tiny "settlers' party" can easily be relegated to irrelevance.

Israel needs, for the sake of stability, electoral reform, the result of which would be, to a large extent, the elimination of small parties.  At such time, the different interest groups in Israel will be forced to make coalitions within the parties.  For example, in America, we know that the Democrats strive to represent the labor unions and the immigrants.  In Israel we would have the labor union party (See Amir Peretz) and the immigrants party (See Yisrael Ba'Aliyah).  In America, the Republicans represent the gun owners and the business owners.  Can anyone imagine that there would be an National Rifle Association party?  The natural situation for which we should work is that the Likud would represent the traditional, religious, and the right-wing.  The party should know that in order to get the votes from its sector, it must live up to their expectations as much as possible.  This would be done by having representatives of the sectors on the Knesset lists, not by separate parliamentary groups.

The Manhigut Yehudit idea includes basically us forcing the Likud to represent us, by becoming active in its institutions and voting in the internal elections and indeed voting for the Likud in the general elections.  Essentially by becomings its constituents.  This is instead of waiting for the aforementioned electoral reform.  I believe in working towards long-term goals.  Voting for the Likud is part of working towards a long-term goal of bringing leadership that represents Jewish ideals to power.

If you don't believe that there is any way to improve our situation, or that we should only be considering short-term goals, then obviously this message does inherently speak to you.  Until the very end, I will put my lot with those that try to find the next step towards our ultimate goal, as taught in Kol HaTor.  And indeed it was at a Manhigut Yehudit Shabbaton years ago that a certain rav  gave a shiur on Kol HaTor.