November 23, 2015: Israel takes small steps toward Jewish religious pluralism

By Michael Regenstreif

In my column in our July 27 issue, I argued against the hegemony of the haredi Orthodox Chief Rabbinate in Jewish religious affairs – including such matters as marriage, divorce and conversion – and the control of Israel’s religious services ministry by the haredi Orthodox parties in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition.

I pointed out that we live in a religiously pluralistic Jewish world, that some of us are very religious, while others are not at all. I said we must respect all Jewish denominations – haredi Orthodox, modern Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist and Reform – as equally legitimate and that Israel, as the homeland of all Jewish people, needs to respect the legitimacy of each of our denominations.

I wrote that column in reaction to a shocking statement, “a Reform Jew, from the moment he stops following Jewish law, I cannot allow myself to say that he is a Jew,” that Religious Services Minister David Azoulay said in an interview on Israeli Army Radio.

The next day, Azoulay rose in the Knesset to clarify his opinion. Reform Jews, he admitted, while sinners, are still Jewish.

There have since been some steps – albeit very small steps – to begin the process of addressing Jewish religious pluralism in Israel. In a speech to the Jewish Federations of North America annual General Assembly, November 10, in Washington, D.C., Netanyahu said he would strengthen the rights of non-Orthodox Jews in Israel.

“As prime minister of Israel, I will always ensure that all Jews can feel at home in Israel – Reform Jews, Conservative Jews, Orthodox Jews – all Jews,” he said.

Netanyahu said the government had formed a roundtable group of representatives of the different religious movements and government ministries in order to address the movements’ concerns. (JTA, the Bulletin’s wire service, reports the roundtable, though first announced months ago, has yet to meet formally.) A couple of days after Netanyahu’s speech at the General Assembly, it was announced that the Jewish Agency for Israel’s annual funding to the Reform and Conservative movements in Israel – $1.09 million each – would be matched by funds from the Prime Minister’s Office.

It’s a beginning, but there is still a long way to go before the non-Orthodox movements attain equal legitimacy in Israel’s religious affairs. Despite being doubled, the funding for the non-Orthodox movements is still very modest and it is coming from the Jewish Agency and the Prime Minister’s Office, not from the religious affairs ministry. But at least Netanyahu recognizes there is a problem that must be addressed.

However, Netanyahu heads Israel’s government by virtue of a numerically weak coalition and, as long as the Knesset seats (currently 13 of 120) controlled by the religious parties – Shas and United Torah Judaism – are enough to put a coalition into power, the government will not take the big steps necessary to effect real change.

November 9, 2015: Canada’s strong friendship with Israel will endure

By Michael Regenstreif

By the time you read this column, Justin Trudeau will have taken office as Canada’s new prime minister after leading the Liberal Party of Canada to majority government status in the October 19 federal election.

No one saw the magnitude of Trudeau’s victory coming. The opinion polls – from day one to day 78 of the longest federal election campaign in modern history – always suggested a minority government. At the beginning of the campaign, the New Democratic Party under Tom Mulcair was in the lead and Trudeau’s Liberals were in third place.

Then Stephen Harper’s Conservatives inched into the lead with the Liberals and NDP so close behind that it looked like any of the three parties might capture a plurality of seats for a minority government. This gave rise to speculation about a possible agreement or coalition between the Liberals and NDP to topple a Conservative minority. That was the state of affairs a month ago, when I wrote my column for the October 12 issue.

By the end of the campaign, support for the NDP had fallen significantly and increased enough for the Liberals that polls suggested a Liberal minority with about 140 of the 338 seats.

But, as the results came in on election night, the Liberal wave took enough formerly safe seats from both the Conservatives and the NDP that the Liberals went from 34 seats and third place in the last election to 184 seats – a solid majority – this time.

Harper’s Conservatives scored a breakthrough in the 2011 election when exit polls indicated they received the support of 52 per cent of Jewish voters, apparently on the basis of Harper’s strong support for Israel (even though the Conservatives never changed Canada’s policies in regard to West Bank settlements, the peace process, the two-state solution, or the status of Jerusalem).

But, in the election campaign, the other party leaders also pledged their support and Canada’s friendship for the Jewish state. There was virtually no substantive policy difference between the parties on Israel – a point Trudeau made forcefully when Harper brought up Israel in the leaders’ foreign policy debate.

While I doubt Trudeau will have the same kind of personal relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as did Harper – I don’t think Netanyahu had a closer personal friend than Harper among the leaders on the world stage – I am sure Canada’s nation-to-nation friendship with, and support for, Israel will continue at the same high level as recent years.

In the 2011 election, all but one of the five seats in Canada with statistically large Jewish populations went to the Conservatives. The only one that didn’t was Mount Royal, where Irwin Cotler’s support among Jewish voters fell sharply. While I’m yet to see any exit polling data on how Jews actually voted in this election, four of those five seats – Mount Royal in Montreal, Eglinton-Lawrence and York Centre in Toronto, and Winnipeg South Centre – were won by Liberals. Only Thornhill, just north of Toronto, remained in the Conservative tent.

Here in Ottawa, all of the ridings with measurable Jewish populations went to the Liberals. The same was true in ridings in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver and perhaps elsewhere across the country.

There were three Jewish members of previous Parliament: Liberal Irwin Cotler (Mount Royal), who did not run in this election, and Conservatives Joe Oliver (Eglinton-Lawrence) and Mark Adler (York Centre), who both went down to defeat.

There are six Jewish members – all of them Liberals – in the new Parliament: Jim Carr (Winnipeg South Centre), Julie Dabrusin (Toronto-Danforth), Karina Gould (Burlington), David Graham (Laurentides-Labelle), Anthony Housefather (Mount Royal) and Michael Levitt (York Centre).

Given the results from across the country, and anecdotally from conversations I’ve had with several Jewish voters, I assume that, if or when we see exit polling data on Jewish voters, it will show that at least some – if not a significant amount – of the vote captured by the Conservatives in 2011 went to the Liberals this time around.

With increasingly dismal results after each of the preceding four elections, many were ready to write off the Liberal Party. If Trudeau governs with the same skills with which he rebuilt the party, it will be an exciting time in Canadian politics.

October 26, 2015: There is never any possible justification for terrorism

 By Michael Regenstreif

As I’ve mentioned before, this column is generally the last thing written before an issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin goes to press, so I often use this space to comment on issues of concern that are in the news while being as up-to-date as is possible when we have to go press 10 days before the official publication date and about a week before the issue begins to arrive in subscribers’ mailboxes.

The two news stories that have dominated my attention as we worked on this issue have been the federal election campaign here in Canada and the terrible wave of terrorism in Israel.

As I write, we are three days away from the October 19 election day. While the votes will have been counted by the time you read this, we can only look at the opinion polls – which may or may not reflect what actually happens at the only polls that ultimately count – and speculate on what will happen and who will form the next government. I expect to have more to say in our next issue on what did happen when we voted.

The latest wave of terrorism has been brutal – at least seven innocent Israelis have been murdered in terrorist attacks in recent days – and so utterly senseless in that the terrorists, many of whom seem to be lone wolves attacking independently, have been inspired, as Barbara Crook notes in her My Israel column, by absolutely false lies and rumours that Israel will seize control or even destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Dome of the Rock, a Muslim holy place built on the site of the ancient Jewish Temples in Jerusalem.

These rumours are not new. When the Second Intifada was launched in 2000, it was said to be in response to a visit to the Temple Mount by Ariel Sharon and his plan to seize control of the Muslim holy place. It turned out, of course, that PLO leader Yasser Arafat had long planned the Intifada.

Then, as now, Israel has been unequivocal that the Al-Aqsa Mosque will remain under the control of the Jordanian Muslim Waqf, as it has since Israel captured eastern Jerusalem from Jordan in the Six-Day War of 1967 and reunited the city.

While much of this latest wave of terrorism has been propagated by so-called lone wolves – some of them very young teenagers – they have been egged on by the highest levels of the Palestinian leadership. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas repeated the claim that Israel would take control of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and has even followed in Arafat’s footsteps by denying the historical existence of the Jewish Temples.

In what was perhaps his most obscene moment of incitement, Abbas took to Palestinian TV on October 14 to claim that Ahmed Mansara, a 13-year-old Palestinian boy, was executed “in cold blood” by Israel.

In fact, Mansara, who was filmed stabbing a Jewish man in Jerusalem, was injured when hit by a car as he attempted to flee the scene of his crime and was recovering well in an Israeli hospital.

Two days later, an unnamed official in Abbas’ office tried to walk back the claim saying Abbas had been misled before making the execution claim. So far, though, Abbas himself has remained silent.

In a speech at Harvard University on October 14, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry blamed the existence of Israeli settlements in the West Bank for the terrorism.

Of course, history tells us that Palestinian terrorism against Israel began years before there was ever an Israeli settlement, and that terrorism from Gaza only increased in the years after Israel shut down its settlements there. The next day, the U.S. State Department walked back Kerry’s statements, suggesting what he meant was the settlements pose an impediment to achieving a two-state solution.

There is never any possible justification for terrorism. In fact, terrorism is always counter-productive as no government (of any country) can allow its citizens to live under such threats for long. The quest for a just peace, for a viable two-state solution to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, is always set back by such violence.

Let us hope there will soon be a return to calm and that the quest for real peace will resume.