It looks like Israel will be heading to a third election. It seems both sides, Netanyahu’s right and Gantz’s left-center cannot get the 61 votes needed to get a majority in the Knesset. There is one villain in this, and one victor.
The reason Netanyahu could not get a victory is that Avigdor Lieberman refuses to throw his weight behind a Netanyahu coalition, unless the special privileges tendered to the religious right are done away with. For years, the religious right have wrested a lot of concessions from the Israeli state, such as draft exemptions and control of marriage.
Secular Israelis complain that Haredim take advantage of social welfare but do not contribute to the military or the economy. – The Conversation
And then there are the marriage laws:
The Israeli government has granted authority over marriage only to the Orthodox rabbinate, not Reform, Conservative or any other more liberal denomination. And the Orthodox rabbinate’s strict rules bar many secular and Reform Jews from getting married at all. – Washington Post
The attitude of some of the Orthodox Rabbis towards the non-Orthodox can be incomprehensible. Israel’s Chief Rabbi would not refer to the Pittsburgh synagogue – where the massacre occurred last year – as a synagogue, as it was not Orthodox.
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