This overloaded news day provokes a secular and politically moderate Israeli to ask if the greater threat against a good life comes from Palestinians or Haredim (ultra-Orthodox)?
In an effort to avoid curses from Jewish readers, I will neither answer that question, nor identify myself as the secular, politically moderate Israeli who is asking it.
Let's start with the cartoon in today's Ha'aretz.
The text reads that the Haredi community is moving to high-tech. The picture shows the good men pushing their burning trash bin from the parking garage open on the Sabbath to an Intel facility, which this week announced that its production lines in Jerusalem would be working on the Sabbath.
Several hundred Haredim protested, threw things, and tried to break into the building. The police let them do their thing until they began attacked the front door. Before the Haredim attacked them, television journalists were able to film confrontations between individuals wanting to work and Haredim asserting that they were violating God's law.
It is another open question as to whether the villains in this piece are the Haredim, the police, or the Intel management.
The hope is that the police were wise in keeping a low profile, letting the Haredim express their need to protest, and that the Haredim will abandon this mission after a few weekends, like they seem to have abandoned the parking garage without success.
The Intel management is not entirely innocent. This facility is in an industrial park only a short walk from a Haredi neighborhood. Working on the Sabbath any place in Jerusalem (except overtly Arab neighborhoods) is an invitation to protest, and something only a couple of hundred meters downhill from a Haredi neighborhood even more so.
Before the weekend, Intel's Israel management indicated that the work must go on. If not, the company would consider pulling out of Jerusalem and perhaps even out of Israel.
That escalation would risk legal problems as well as management headaches. Intel has research and development as well as production facilities in Israel, with its largest facility south of Tel Aviv. It has received substantial financial inducements from the Israeli government, which entail some obligations on the part of the company.
We can hope for calm and good sense, without expecting it to erupt in the next week or two. And for the Haredim to stay in their communities, running their own lives without trying to impose their laws on the rest of us, while the Palestinians also pass over their rough patch of dire threats.
Anyone wanting to bet a shekel or two?
Ira Sharkansky (Emeritus)
Department of Political Science
Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel
Tel: +972-2-532-2725
email: msira@mscc.huji.ac.il