In an About Face, Israel’s Most Secular Politician Urges Cooperation With Orthodox Parties To Oust Netanyahu

In a move for the flip-flop record books, Israel’s most secularist politician, Avigdor Liberman, is calling for coalescing with Orthodox parties, known as Haredi, in order to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.A top demand of the Change Bloc before the October 27 election was ending Israel’s long tradition of excluding orthodox youth from otherwise universal army conscription. Making the drafting truly universal was a rallying cry in anti-Netanyahu gatherings. Earlier this year the premier attempted to legislate a half-hearted reform in the draft law. The opposition claimed the legislation fell short of the army’s needs and was a politically motivated concession to the Haredi parties. The bill failed. A pre-election poster overlooking Tel Aviv’s top thoroughfare, Ayalon Highway, depicts Mr. Liberman under the slogan “100 percent to soldiers, nothing to draft dodgers.” The poster is still there but on Friday Mr. Liberman, the leader of Israel is Our Home party, urged a coalition that would include Haredi parties. The Change Bloc’s most urgent tasks, Mr. Liberman wrote on X on Friday, are to oust Mr. Netanyahu, prevent a new election, and avoid reliance on the Arab parties. “On all other issues,” he added, “it is permissible and desirable to be flexible and compromise, and to understand that you cannot have it all. This includes the issue of the conscription law.”Mr. Liberman’s statement followed reports that he was negotiating with leaders of one orthodox party, United Torah Judaism. A strong supporter of draft exemptions for religious scholars, UTJ has been part of Mr. Netanyahu’s ruling coalition. UTJ leaders declined in a Thursday meeting with President Isaac Herzog to support the premiership of either Mr. Netanyahu or the Change Bloc’s leader, Gadi Eisenkot. “We will recommend the candidate who’d resolve the drafting law issue,” one of the party leaders, Yitzhak Goldknopf, told the president. The four leaders of the Change Bloc ran for election as a “Servers Union.” In political rallies, they highlighted Israelis who for several months each year are called to leave families and businesses to serve as reservists in the Israel Defense Force. Army commanders say they urgently need a large number of new recruits. “I’m raising ten red flags,” The IDF chief of staff, Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, told Mr. Netanyahu’s cabinet this summer. The army needs more than 15,000 new recruits, out of which at least 7000 soldiers must be available for combat units, General Zamir said. The Moldova-born Mr. Liberman has long led older, secular Israeli voters of former Soviet bloc origins. His Israel Is Our Home party was long considered the country’s most adamant critic of Haredi coercion, advocating sales of non-Kosher foods, making buses available on the Sabbath, and allowing non-orthodox conversions. All those are red flags for Haredi politicians. “Live and let live,” Mr. Liberman wrote on X in June. He disclosed that his wife of four decades, Ella, is religious who strictly obeys Sabbath rules, while he likes to play tennis on Saturday. Similarly, he wrote, Israel must be “a country where each man and woman lives according to their faith, not based on coercion.”Israelis were shocked at Mr. Liberman’s about face, and even leaders of the Change Bloc were taken aback. Mr. Eisenkot reiterated his four conditions for joining a coalition he would lead. One of those, he wrote Friday, is “mandatory service for all” to “strengthen the IDF and expand its ranks.” If the UTJ joins Mr. Eisenkot, the Change Bloc can reach a 61 seat Knesset majority. Yet some of the bloc leaders prefer relying on Arab parties, to reach an even larger majority, than leaning on Haredi votes. Yet the most likely Arab partner, Mansour Abbas, made that coalition less likely this week, when he declined to call Hamas a terror organization.One of Mr. Eisenkot’s four conditions to join his coalition is “recognition of Hamas as a terror organization and a commitment to dismantling its military and governing power.” In his Friday post, though, Mr. Eisenkot added that abiding by that condition can happen “either now or later.”

In an About Face, Israel’s Most Secular Politician Urges Cooperation With Orthodox Parties To Oust Netanyahu

In an About Face, Israel’s Most Secular Politician Urges Cooperation With Orthodox Parties To Oust Netanyahu

More from the New York Sun

Being John Malkovich Not Enough To Rescue ‘Wild Horse Nine’

In ‘The Unbelievers,’ Faith and Understanding Go Missing

Marco Rubio and the Question of ’28

Taken for a Ride

It’s a Worshipful Life: James Stewart Biopic Mistakes a Star for a Saint

Trump Says Susie Wiles Is Out as Chief of Staff, Names Stephen Miller as Her Replacement

Four States Pass Measures To Ban Biological Boys From Girls’ Sports

Inside the Democratic Campaign That Won Long Island’s ‘Unflippable’ Red District

More from the New York Sun

Being John Malkovich Not Enough To Rescue ‘Wild Horse Nine’

In ‘The Unbelievers,’ Faith and Understanding Go Missing

Marco Rubio and the Question of ’28

Taken for a Ride

It’s a Worshipful Life: James Stewart Biopic Mistakes a Star for a Saint

Trump Says Susie Wiles Is Out as Chief of Staff, Names Stephen Miller as Her Replacement

Four States Pass Measures To Ban Biological Boys From Girls’ Sports

Inside the Democratic Campaign That Won Long Island’s ‘Unflippable’ Red District