The oracle of the right[Israel]

[Ace Pace]

Haaretz editorial.

The more time passes, the clearer it becomes that the foreign policy worldview of Shas fluctuates between the right and the extreme right. Eli Yishai, the party's current leader, has in the past several years laid down a blunt foreign policy that has pushed it from moderation to extremism. Not a day goes by that he does not lay out his red lines and warn against any possibility of compromise with the Palestinians.

Yishai has already threatened Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, telling him that if he dares to address the core issues of the conflict at the Annapolis summit, Yishai and his party will leave the coalition. In doing so, he became one of the main agents who has made the gathering superfluous even before it has begun.

It was not always this way. When Shas burst onto the political scene in 1984, it voiced moderate opinions. Under the leadership of its previous, charismatic chairman, Aryeh Deri, the party was meticulous about expressing the Sephardic spirit that lent it the reputation of moderation and pragmatism. There were two faces to the moderation presented by Shas: an ultra-Orthodoxy that was less extremist than the Ashkenazi version, and a view of the conflict with the Palestinians that was less zealous than that of the national-religious camp.

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the founder and religious leader of Shas, was particularly remarkable in this area. The man, who until the age of 14 worked in his father's grocery in Jerusalem's Bukharan neighborhood, became in old age a respected figure with hundreds of thousands of followers. There were no bounds to his prestige. Yosef's religious rulings shaped the lives of the movement's devotees and supporters. In the 1990s, Shas played a key role in the peace process. It began with Yosef's revolutionary religious ruling that adopted the "land for peace" formula and determined that the value of saving human lives (pikuah nefesh) took priority over other values such as settling the Land of Israel.



In the 1991 Gulf War, Deri, then a cabinet minister, had a significant hand in shaping Israel's policy of restraint. About two years later, Shas joined forces with prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and helped him gain Knesset approval for the first Oslo accord. The right condemned Deri and his colleagues and fought hard to degrade Rabbi Ovadia's spiritual standing.

Shas's problems mounted with Deri's legal troubles. The party reached its apex of political power in the 1999 election, which gave it 17 Knesset seats - the revenge of the Sephardim - ironically, just when the party was in its greatest crisis following Deri's criminal conviction. The voices of revulsion at Shas that were expressed in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square immediately following Ehud Barak's victory in that election further heightened the sense of rejection felt by party supporters.

The rift with the left was unavoidable, as was the alienation from its position vis-a-vis the Palestinians. Deri's resignation from politics left a vacuum into which Yishai, a leader with no outstanding qualities who had exploited his family connection to Rabbi Ovadia in order to take control of the party, was sucked.

In particular, he is responsible for its move to the right, even the extreme right. At the same time, he has taken advantage of Rabbi Ovadia's failing health in order to pave the party's way to the far right.
It is no secret that Rabbi Ovadia has become tired. He is approaching the end of his ninth decade and his senses are not as sharp as they once were. Yishai, a regular at the rabbi's home, has become Yosef's liaison to the outside world.

It is a great pity that the party that was born in order to rouse the poor and the disadvantaged and to restore the lost glory of the Sephardim has turned into yet another extremist right-wing party. It forgot its initial motto and is now up to its neck in an unprecedented fever of religious revivalism. One more fundamentalism movement, crazed by religion.

And what of the oppressed, screwed-over poor? Well, since Shas joined the government, they have only become more numerous. It's enough to look at the shocking poverty figures published each year by the National Insurance Institute to recognize that Shas broke its promise to the poor. And if that is not enough, now Eli Yishai comes and turns himself into an oracle of the extreme right. It is doubtful that he reflects the Sephardic spirit of days gone by.