Word: shas
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...Shas' every move is calculated to play on Mizrahis' most basic beliefs: their faith in the power of the tzaddiks, their resentment of being discriminated against by European Jews and a knee that jerks to the right when it comes to the peace process. Shas quit the Cabinet in July because Barak wouldn't advise the party leadership of his plans for the Camp David summit with President Bill Clinton and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Barak's response was to call for a "secular revolution" that would end the Orthodox rabbis' lock on institutions like marriage and allow civil weddings...
...such powerful belief, you have to be pretty cynical not at least to wish for a miracle. But in Israel today it's a question of the kind of miracle you're looking for. The most controversial point in Israeli domestic politics is the way the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party uses mystical faith to cast an aura of purity around its machine. Rabbi Ifargan, 34, is the most prominent new leader in a wave of cabalistic mysticism sweeping Israel, particularly among the 60% of the population known as Mizrahis, who emigrated from North Africa and the Middle East. Though Ifargan...
...controversial remarks speak to the theological dilemma the Holocaust poses for ultra-Orthodox Jews, they are also an eloquent comment on the depth of tribal enmity among the citizens of the Jewish state. Iraqi-born Rabbi Yosef is also the spiritual leader of Israel's third largest party, Shas, an ultra-Orthodox party representing Sephardic Jews, who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries and suffered racist treatment at the hands of the Ashkenazi (of European origin) elite...
...Labor party, which governed Israel for the first three decades of its independence, has borne the brunt of the resultant hostility, and despite apologizing for its past ill-treatment of the Sephardim, it continues to suffer their ire. Shas recently bolted Prime Minister Ehud Barak's coalition, and last week helped defeat his nominee for president - the ur-Ashkenazi Shimon Peres - instead electing an Iranian-born legislator from the opposition. But the contempt for European Jewry implied by Rabbi Yosef's depiction of Holocaust victims signals a new low, and the fact that it came as part of a sermon...
...continue to avert a walkout of the second largest party in his coalition - which would ostensibly force him into a minority government, an alliance with the hawkish Likud party or a new election - Barak is playing the beleaguered dove. His finance minister, Avraham Shohat, insisted Tuesday that the issues Shas is raising have been resolved. "They did not resign over that, but for political motives of another kind: differences over the peace process." Israeli political analysts don't buy that, but the spin may be intended for Madeleine Albright ahead of her imminent arrival in the region to nudge Barak...