Reply To: Time to make the popcorn

Yankel Berel – The story of the Bagatz in a nutshell, is that Israel was never really a true democracy when it comes to religious matters. For the first 30 years the Labor-Mapai Socialists ruled as a de-facto one party state where 80% of the job market was controlled by the ruling party via the corrupt Histadrut. This was used to force the Sephardi olim to either send their kids to secular public schools or be shut out from 80% of the jobs. (Unless they came here with high level skills or education, they didn’t qualify for most of the remaining 20% either, so they were stuck. Some tzadikim were moser nefesh, but many didn’t make it, as is well known.) After Menachem Begin broke the Leftist monopoly, and his successors in the Likud (including Bibi as Finance Minister) steadily chipped away at the Histadrut crime racket (which is the main reason the Left hate them so much, they killed their first big power base), so the Left went looking for a new solution. They realized that real democracy and demography necessarily go together, and demography wasn’t their strong point… So they needed a non-democratic solution. They did this by transferring more and more power to the Supreme Court. The Israeli SC is a relic from British Colonial law, which was never reformed because Israel never adopted a formal constitution. This was aided greatly by the personal ambitions of Aharon Barak. The Right wing parties looked the other way, because they too were afraid of a growing Chareidi population, and wanted to guarantee the future of ‘democracy’, i.e. secularism. In general, in Israel, whenever they talk about ‘democracy’, they mean ‘secularism’, not ‘majority rule’. Now, 30 years later, the Right are waking up to realize that the Golem has turned against them, to the point where the elected government doesn’t really control basic functions of the State.