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Al-Ahram Weekly 7 - 13 September 2000 Issue No. 498 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 7 - 13 September 2000 Issue No. 498
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Deri's fall from grace
By Graham UsherOn Sunday Aryeh Deri, former leader of the Sephardi orthodox party, Shas, began the first day of a three-year jail term for bribery, fraud and breach of trust while serving as interior minister in the Israeli governments of the 1980s and 1990s. He was accompanied on his way to prison by tens of thousands of grieving, angry supporters.
Understandably so, for Deri's incarceration marks an amazing fall for a man who steered Shas to the third biggest party in Israeli politics and played a seminal role in the governments of both Yitzak Rabin and Binyamin Netanyahu. He also exposed like no other the raw ethnic and cultural divides that fracture Israel's Jews.
For his detractors, that was his biggest crime. Deri represented a benighted "fundamentalist" movement subversive of "a democratic, modern and Zionist Israel", wrote Israeli columnist Yosef Goell in The Jerusalem Post on 4 September.
For his supporters -- not all of whom are religious -- he was the first to express publicly that suppression of the Sephardim's religious and "eastern" identity lay at the very heart of the Ashkenazi (European) ideology of "secular Zionism". Unusually for an orthodox politician he also called for equality between Israel's Jewish and Arab citizens and supported the Oslo peace process.
The bigger question is what will Shas be without Deri. "Just another right-wing religious party in the Knesset," is the verdict of Ammon Raz, professor of Jewish history at Beer Sheva's Ben-Gurion University.
It appears to have already become so. Since Deri's resignation as party secretary last year, Shas has reverted to being an orthodox haredi party, hostile to the Palestinians and suspicious of peace. In July -- on the eve of his departure to Camp David -- it took its 17 members out of Ehud Barak's ruling coalition. Shas' spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovedia Yosef, justified the move on the grounds that Arabs were "snakes" and "Ishmaelites."
But Deri has also changed. In recent appearances, he has presented himself less as the voice of ethnic grievance than a religious leader, marshalling both Sephardi and Ashkenazi orthodox parties under the aegis of a "Jewish revolution" against the despised "secular" agendas of the Ashkenazi elites, foremost among them are Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
That battle looks set to continue, with or without Deri. On the day of his imprisonment, the Israeli cabinet announced plans to abolish Israel's Religious Ministry, which Shas once had much influence over. Most saw the move as the first shot in Barak's so-called "secular revolution," a package of civil and social reforms whose ultimate goal is to weaken the religious parties' hold on various sectors of the state. For Shas, and Deri, too, this now is the battlefield, exceeding in importance the fight against discrimination in Israel or peace with the Palestinians.
