After probably not refusing a single media interview in the
years since he entered politics, Shinui leader Tommy Lapid
has not said a public word for several days now. Most
observers say that he will probably announce his retirement
from politics, but his supporters say that if he really knew
what he wanted to say there is no way that he would be silent
for so long.
The Shinui "movement" was started by Avraham Poraz, the
former number two on the party list. He invited Tommy Lapid
to join as the number one, and thereby got a deluge of
publicity as the media enjoyed quoting Lapid's wisecracks,
and as a result they got 450,000 votes in the last election
entitling them to 15 Knesset seats.
Last week in Shinui's democratic internal primary elections,
Lapid just barely held onto his position against a straw
candidate and Poraz was left out entirely. It was clearly the
final blow as the polls showed Shinui hovering around the
threshold for entering the Knesset, suggesting that they
would almost certainly not make the cut. Voters can tell the
pollsters whom they like, but at the last minute they are not
likely to throw out their vote on a party that may not get in
at all.
Some pundits are saying that this is the end of the Shinui
era. The truth is that there never was such a thing. The huge
vote they received was on a mass whim that had no substance
and no staying power. There is a pool of votes that sloshes
around between the left of the Labor party, the Meretz-Yachad
party and smaller parties. Lapid drew it all in with his
colorful campaign, but his single-minded focus on bashing
chareidim got boring for most people who think about other
things in life.
Even Yossi Sarid, the former leader of Meretz who was no
friend of the chareidim, wrote that the Shinui party was not
a "party of one man and one banner," but rather "a party with
one leg" and that "single leg was also one that trampled
every ultra-Orthodox Jew as if he were a cockroach and his
children as if they were worms." Master of metaphor that he
is, Sarid asked, "How far can you get without two legs or
even crutches, before you trip and fall flat on the
floor?"
Shinui, Sarid says, will disappear without a trace. "It is
slipping off the public table like an oily omelet splattering
on the floor. The omelet must be thrown out, and the oily
smudge wiped. No egg will come of this omelet, not even a
scrambled egg."
That is not exactly true. Sarid finds himself outside
politics today because Shinui's success was partially at the
expense of the seats of the Meretz party that he led, and his
party wanted new leadership as a result.
Also, the chareidi community is still suffering from the
single-minded obsession of Shinui with cutting government
support to our families and institutions. To be sure Sharon,
Netanyahu and the NRP bear passive responsibility for not
doing more to prevent the severe and unfair cuts. Relative to
the budget of the entire State, the amounts gained by many of
the cuts to programs which benefited chareidim were too small
to have any influence and could not have been considered
important to Netanyahu's general economic policies. However
Shinui was determined to do whatever ill it could to the
chareidi community, and none of the other partners in the
government stood in its way.
All the high-thinking political analysts say that the Israeli
political system needs more stability and that one way to
bring it that is to raise the voting threshold to eliminate
small parties that can have undue influence. Some people say
that this is really just another ploy to try to minimize or
remove the chareidi influence on Israeli political life.
Although we will not support such moves because of the
immediate threat they carry for our existing institutions, we
confess that such moves do not really worry us. As long as
the Israeli political system is reasonably democratic, our
influence will be felt, in one way or another. That is not
only due to our not-any-more-so-small-and-growing numbers,
but also due to the fact that our ideas resonate strongly
among portions of the Israeli body politic that far exceed
our hard-core supporters.
All those analysts would do well to reflect on the Shinui
phenomenon, in which a party achieved an awesome but
temporary success that allowed it to force changes that are
ridiculed even by the likes of Yossi Sarid, and were really
wanted only by the fanatic anti-chareidi fringe, which
managed to draw a number of votes that would pass any
reasonable threshold that could be imposed.
Ultimately, it is not the political system that governs
Israelis which needs to be reformed, but the Israelis
themselves.
