Israel’s religious extremists send the peace process up in smoke

Population changes are transforming the country’s politics for the worse, argues Con Coughlin.

The Telegraph | By Con Coughlin | 10 Dec 2010

Over the past week, fierce forest fires have devastated large swathes of Israel, killing 42 people – including the country’s most senior female police officer. So you could be forgiven for thinking that the emergency services needed all the help they could lay their hands on.

It is not hard to imagine the firefighters’ anger – and disbelief – on discovering that the country’s interior minister, Eli Yishai, had rejected an offer by a Christian charity in North America to donate some fire engines. Given that the country often struggles to provide adequate cover during such emergencies, the proposal by the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews could have made a vital contribution to the attempts to bring the fires under control.

But Mr Yishai, who represents the ultra-Orthodox Shas party in the ruling coalition, had other ideas. Shas, which speaks for Israel’s burgeoning ultra-Orthodox community, is deeply suspicious of non-Jewish organisations, even those that are committed to Israel’s well-being. Many of its supporters fear any help offered by Christian groups is part of some sinister plot to convert the Jews.

Fanning the flames of intolerance: the rejection of Christian help to fight the forest fires has caused tension within Israel

So Mr Yishai vetoed the American charity’s offer – and in doing so, further inflamed tensions between more secular-minded Israelis, who form the majority of the population, and the religious hardliners whose growing influence over government policy is a source of mounting friction between the communities. The anger only grew when Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the spiritual leader of Shas, publicly declared that the fires were divine retribution for the failure of secular Israelis to observe the Sabbath.

But then, such acrimonious exchanges have become the norm rather than the exception, in a country whose very future is, many fear, being placed in jeopardy by the growth of the extremists. And this week’s decision by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, to reject an American request to extend the freeze on building in settlements, provides a graphic illustration of the trend.

After last year’s general election produced an inconclusive result, Mr Netanyahu took advantage of Israel’s complex electoral system to form what is arguably the most Right-wing government in its history. Thus, while his Likud party remains dominant within the coalition, it relies heavily on the support of Shas and the even more hardline Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel is our home”), led by Avigdor Lieberman, the hawkish foreign minister. Mr Lieberman, who was born in Soviet-controlled Moldova and emigrated to Israel in the 1970s, finds his greatest support among the million or so Russian Jews who have become Israeli citizens since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The real problem, however, is that while many Israelis resent the growing influence of the likes of Shas and Yisrael Beiteinu, the coalition is in many respects a reflection of the demographic changes that have transformed the political landscape over the past 20 years.

Modern Israel is barely recognisable from the country I was first posted to 25 years ago. Then, the overwhelming consensus favoured peaceful co-existence with its Arab neighbours. Shimon Peres, the Labour leader who now serves as Israel’s president, was at the forefront of official efforts to make peace with the country’s enemies, which ultimately resulted in the signing of treaties with Egypt and Jordan.

In my district of Jerusalem, Jews and Arabs lived happily side by side; it was not uncommon for Palestinians to babysit Israeli children while their parents enjoyed a night out, perhaps at one of the Palestinian restaurants that catered for Israeli tastes.

Today, the divisions between the communities are so entrenched as to make such cosy arrangements unthinkable. The current attitude is better reflected by a recent rabbinical edict that forbids Jewish landlords from renting properties to Palestinian tenants.

Looking back, it seems clear that the rapid expansion of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, together with the mass immigration of Russian Jews, has been a major factor in this sharp shift in political orientation.

The closest Israel has come to making peace with the Palestinians was in 1993, when Bill Clinton signed the ground-breaking Oslo Accords with Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, who was subsequently murdered by a Jewish extremist opposed to any deal. Reflecting on recent efforts to revive the dialogue by his wife Hillary, now Secretary of State, Mr Clinton singled out Russian immigrants as the central obstacle, identifying “children of Russians and settlers” as “the hardest-core people against a division of the land”.

That is a view shared by many senior officials in Whitehall, who tell me they are pessimistic about the prospects for a Middle East peace settlement. “Israel is a very different country today to what it was 20 years ago,” one recently admitted. So long as the country’s fate lies in the hands of religious and nationalist extremists, I find it almost impossible to contemplate the day when Israelis can once again co-exist peacefully with their Palestinian neighbours.