1.
On the eve of the holidays a year ago, in the office of Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman. I needed a lot of courage to do it This interview with himjust like with Yair Lapid in 2015 when he was (still) assigned due to disgust in ultra-Orthodox society.
Lieberman was proud of the state budget that was approved, told some about the social budget. But a year later, I don’t think he would have opened it up for discussion, when people are rummaging through garbage cans, trying to survive the month.
He also boasted about lowering the exemption age for the ultra-Orthodox, which in his opinion would bring masses of ultra-Orthodox out of kollel and yeshivas into jobs. A year has passed, the exemption age has not decreased, the draft law has not been passed. And government? nothing.
He then had a dreamy hope: he spoke of four Knesset members from the Likud who are already standing on the lines and waiting for the opportunity to join the coalition. When I tried to tell him that they meant the day after Netanyahu, he insisted. “I also listened to the sound of the music,” he said. And it was clear to him, that there are defectors.
“You are sitting there in the armchairs behind the plenum, there is not a single person in Likud who believes in Netanyahu. Everyone says, we are in the opposition only because of him,” he said.
A year has passed, they can continue to chat in the armchairs behind the plenum, but none of them has stood up against Netanyahu as a candidate for Likud leadership.
“I don’t see a situation that the coalition won’t live out its days”, he surprised me at the time with the decisiveness with which he made this statement.
4 years? I was amazed.
“Yes”, he replied, confident.
I tried to ask who is suspected as such to dissolve the government, but Lieberman claimed that there is currently none and that “everyone is clear that the alternative is worse.” He even added that if the government lasts four and a half years, “then there will surely be another term”.
Happy New Year and her dreams.
2.
But there was one moment when I knew that this government would fall soon, and the hourglass was already upside down on a table. It was The moment he bent, the one with a kippah on his head, scorning the lambs.
When the heads of the ultra-Orthodox factions called together the ultra-Orthodox journalists in the days before the establishment of the Bennet-Lapid government and demanded that we attack it, I refused to participate in this dance. I said, we will examine the government according to its actions.
When I met Ayelet Shaked the day before the formation of the government in one of the Knesset corridors, I asked her if I shouldn’t be worried about what the new government would do to my public. She replied emphatically: I am not worried about what will happen to the ultra-Orthodox, nothing will happen to them, I am afraid of what will happen to the right-wing public.
But then, on one of the days of the month of Adar A, Naftali Bennett gave a shameful speech.
I met Ayelet, again in the corridor, this time I was firm. “You know, Ayelet, that unlike many of my colleagues in the ultra-orthodox media, I don’t criticize the government for an automatic, but Bennett’s speech stung me and cut me in the flesh. Is this how to treat our boys? My?”
I’m not sure she fully understood what exactly I wanted, I’m not even sure she conveyed the message to him. I did my protest duty.
This is what the man said at the time, who at the end of a year found himself, in shame, in his home.
“I want to tell you tonight the story of a family – the Gonen family. For years the Gonen or Levy or Adri family – give and give. The parents served in the army, pay taxes, the family endures in good times and in difficult times. These are the good people who get up every morning, check on the children, send them to school, distribute them to classes, go to work. These are the working families.
“The contract says that the good citizens, the workers, who bear the burden of the state’s existence, deserve to keep more of their salary.”
They, the workers, are the good citizens. Our children, devoid of the core, wearing the benches of the midrash houses in kollels and yeshivas, absolutely not. And all this, with a kippah on the head.
My heart told me that there would be a price for this. It is not possible for a Jew to despise Torah scholars like this, to turn them into ‘bad citizens’, just because they study in the Kollel – and his government will not be punished.
From this moment on, his downfall will begin, my heart foretold.
3.
But the one who recognized him first was, without a doubt, MK Yitzhak Pindros, whom I met in the Knesset from the beginning of Adar B. A wide smile was on his faceI had a hard time understanding what and why.
These days are days of frequent and ongoing decrees. It is true that the session ended without the coalition being able to pass the conscription law or the conversion law, but the kashrut reform has already entered into force, the hourglass for the coming into effect of the dormitories law has already begun to run, the conscription law was in fairly advanced stages of preparation and it seemed that it would be passed at the beginning of the next session, the Minister of Transportation released Painful statements about Shabbat desecration. In short, the situation seemed bleak.
Pindarus explained to me that his sense of smell sensed the end of this evil government, and if there were a few more days until the recess, it would already have fallen. So o-to-to after the return from the Passover break it will happen. “At the current momentum, a month,” he said.
The truth is, I looked at him as delusional. But a month passed and Idit Silman announced her retirement.
“I was with Idit Silman on a trip to Hungary,” he told me later, “from the conversations with her I understood that she would not be able to stand it much longer. You cannot go back to your neighbors, to your husband, to people in synagogue, and tell them that you are unable to act. You can do it for a day, two days, a month, two months – in the end it’s over.”
In those days, I still hoped that Ayelet Shaked would be the next retiree. He was much more sober. “I don’t expect anything from Ayelet,” he said.
And justice.
It took two years for the Bennet-Lapid ‘brothers’ government of 2013 to die out, many months for the fourth Netanyahu government to repair the damage.
For the current government of change it took much less, a year and a bit.
Praying that next year we will be able to roll back its decrees and open a new page for the ultra-Orthodox public.
On a glass of sweet drink, placed on a disposable plate.