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Family Feud
| Article
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17653 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1990 |
2,675 Words |
| Author
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Yo'av Karny
Yo'av Karny is the senior U.S. correspondent for the Israeli
daily newspaper Ha'aretz. He has been a top political reporter
for more than fifteen years. |
Et Hazamir
(THE TIME OF TRIMMING)
Haim Be'er Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1989
560 pp.
In March of this year, a political crisis that had been brewing in Israel for some months finally came to a head. The crisis was rooted in Israeli bickering over U.S. Secretary of State James Baker's plan for advancing Middle East peace talks - but it never would have boiled over had not an elderly rabbi instructed five members of the Knesset to abstain during a no-confidence motion.
In the middle of intense debate surrounding the no-confidence vote, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir suddenly requested a two-hour recess. Accompanied by his top aides, the veteran Likud Party leader was whisked in his limousine to the home of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. There they begged the former Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel not to topple the government. Hard on Shamir's heels came Labor Party leaders Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin, both former prime ministers and leading powers in the fast-crumbling national unity government. Israel's three foremost political figures heard out the rabbi's ultimatum: If they all signed a compromise agreement, authored by the rabbi, he would spare the present government. Whoever refused to sign would risk his political life.
Shamir would not sign. Minutes later, the Knesset voted no confidence in Shamir's government. For the first time in history, an Israeli government fell as the result of a vote in Parliament.
This unprecedented political drama, which is still being played out, is the startling incarnation of the theme of a prescient novel by Haim Be'er: the increasingly influential role of ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Israeli political life.
At the beginning of The Time of Trimming, Be'er relates the story of the meeting in the fall of 1952 between Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, and the ultra-Orthodox sage Rabbi Abraham Isaiah Karlitz (better known to Israelis by his honorary title, Hazon Ish, Hebrew for vision of a man - ED). Karlitz was the representative of "a disintegrating world, forlorn and moribund," while Ben Gurion was "the bold, charismatic and unequivocal leader…of a young and vibrant nation."
Those days were a time of unparalleled tension between secularists and religionists in
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