If this crisis brings down the government, it will be Ben Gvir who takes the decisive step

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The Israeli government is determined to reject a deal and continue fighting until total victory — if not on the all-important Gaza front, then within the halls of the Knesset.

The defense minister’s announcement that the IDF will begin sending draft orders to yeshivah students next month, along with the immediate response from Shas and litvish roshei yeshivah, temporarily sidelined another bitter conflict within the coalition: Minister of Public Security Itamar Ben Gvir, who’s holding up Knesset votes of importance to Shas, versus Shas chairman Aryeh Deri, who’s blocking Ben Gvir’s entrance to any sort of security cabinet with authority over the war.

Last week brought the crisis into the open, with Itamar Ben Gvir announcing that he would vote against a coalition bill regulating the status of Israel’s city and chief rabbis. Usually, when the coalition is divided on a critical bill, the Knesset looks like a beehive, with senior coalition figures and their aides bustling to and fro between the prime minister’s office and the plenum. Knesset guards surround the VIP-packed area, and the tension can be cut with a knife, even in the corridors.

In the recent crises between Shas and Otzma Yehudit, the atmosphere in the building was not one of tension but of despair. The staircase connecting the Knesset plenum to the government floor was conspicuously empty, with both Shas and Otzma Yehudit refusing to meet or talk with Netanyahu, highlighting the prime minister’s loss of control.

“What do you want me to do?” Netanyahu demanded from Shas representatives. He found himself communicating with Deri only through emissaries.

The response reflected the mood of the entire chareidi delegation in the Knesset: “The person responsible for the coalition functioning is you, the prime minister,” Shas MK Yinon Azoulai told Netanyahu. “The chareidim show up for every coalition vote, but in the Likud and Otzma Yehudit, everyone does what they want. Maybe this government really has no justification to exist, and we should all vote to dissolve it.”

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Itamar Ben Gvir, the right-wing government’s official trouble-maker, is full of grievances. Not only against Deri, who describes him as an “irresponsible populist” and is blocking him from entering any decision-making bodies, but also against Prime Minister Netanyahu, who promised to find a way to get him involved in war decisions after Gantz and Eizenkot left the government.

“Bibi told me, ‘I’ll bring you into the circle of decision-makers,’ ” Ben Gvir told me. When Netanyahu cares to, he knows how to sit down with you and give you the sense that your dream is right around the corner.

Netanyahu’s suggestion was to turn the forum of coalition party leaders into a kind of alternative cabinet. That way, Bibi explained, the coalition wouldn’t come under fire. “This forum already exists today. We’ll just start using it to discuss substantive issues relating to the war.”

Ben Gvir waited and watched, day after day, as the promise failed to materialize. With no official substitute for the disbanded war cabinet, Netanyahu continued consulting regularly with an informal kitchen cabinet that included ministers Gallant and Dermer as well as Deri.

“What happened to the promise?” asked Ben Gvir this week.

To which an aide quipped, “You’ll get it along with the ‘total victory’ ” — the government's declared war aim, which seems a long way off.

Since Netanyahu’s insincere promise, the reasons for keeping Ben Gvir out of the room have only multiplied. First came Labour’s victory in the UK elections, while in France, President Macron allied with the Marxist left to defeat the right’s Marine Le Pen — a white dove compared to Ben Gvir. Calls have already been heard in London to reverse the UK’s opposition to arrest warrants against Israeli leaders, while French far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon announced in his victory speech that a leftist government’s first step would be recognition of a Palestinian state.

In this atmosphere, Ben Gvir’s addition to the cabinet would give the US, the last of Israel’s Western allies, justification for turning its back on an extremist Israeli government. But even putting that aside, Netanyahu can’t sit with someone he sees as a serial leaker, and who recently mocked his health condition by demanding that those with pacemakers be polygraphed as well.

Netanyahu has known how to leverage his status as the left’s bête noire over the years to reenforce his support on the right. Ben Gvir’s blatant contempt for him is completely different. This is the first time the right-wing bloc has produced a leader who not only clashes with Netanyahu, but disrespects him personally, without seemingly worrying about a political price.

Chazal teach us that a king who permits himself to be dishonored will never gain respect, and it’s not that different for a prime minister. Whether it’s an Israeli prime minister or an American president, respect for the office is what holds the political system together.

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Aryeh Deri, who rose this week from shivah for his brother Rav Yehuda Deri, the chief rabbi of Be’er Sheva, sees Ben Gvir’s presence in the cabinet as a security threat.

“I’m not a minister, and I’m not obligated to sit in any forum,” Deri told Netanyahu after the dissolution of the War Cabinet. “I won’t attend cabinet meetings, and you won’t find me in any room where security matters are discussed in his presence.”

If this crisis brings down the government, it will be Ben Gvir who takes the decisive step. Shas has already proven its willingness to forgive almost anything so as not to be accused of dismantling the government. Unlike Deri, Ben Gvir has no funding for Talmud Torahs or yeshivos to protect. Sitting in opposition with a seat total in the double digits is not a bad outcome from his perspective. For him, opposition is a way of life.

Despite all this, Netanyahu himself said last week in a closed conversation that “the greatest threat to the integrity of the coalition was and remains the draft crisis.”

If there’s one thing the collective chareidi Knesset representation agrees on, Ashkenazi or Sephardi, litvish or chassidic, it’s that the current government has accomplished nothing for the chareidi community. The only reason the chareidim are still in a government with a record of failure is the specter of Lapid and Lieberman sending draft orders to every yeshivah student, without exception.

If draft orders are issued to yeshivah bochurim indiscriminately next month, even the last reason to stay in the government will have gone, along with Shimon’s Peres’s famous question during the Knesset debates regarding the Oslo Accords: “What’s the alternative?”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1020)