Neoconservatism (Yisrael)
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Neoconservatism refers to a right-wing political movement in Yisrael that emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s but became publicly visible later in the 2010s under the presidency of Conservative Noah Feldman (2012-2020) that brought together the political and religious right into a durable political coalition in Yisraeli politics. It is considered the successor of the New Right movement among the Dati Leumi in the 1970s and 1980s in reaction to the Yarden Accords.
Post-Yarden Chareidi world
Chareidi politics in the 1970s and 1980s
The Chareidi sector of Yisraeli society was small and insular in the years after the Year of Blood. Surveys in the 1960s pegged sectarian affiliation as under 10% of the overall public. The Dati Leumi, religious Jews who participated more freely with the less-religious, secular-oriented culture, dominated the advocacy and identification of Dati (religious) interests in national and local politics. Few Chareidim involved themselves in political activities, instead focused on intensive Torah study in their yeshivos in Chareidi neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, given the weak religious cultural power in post-1951 society, many Chareidi-affiliated families could not afford tuition to private yeshivos and sent their children to the Mamlachti (state secular) schools. These public schools were strictly secular and taught Jewish and Bible topics as a secular discipline. While the government permitted the Dati sectors to operate their own schools (typically day schools, yeshivos (for boys), and seminaries (for girls)), with some state aid, many Dati families could not afford even this and sent their children to the Mamlachti schools.
The Chareidi public faced a growing crisis as many children who attended Mamlachti schools abandoned or relaxed their family's strict religious observances, with many becoming Chiloni and going "off the derech." This peaked in the late 1960s, as the contemporaneous baal teshuva movement was under way after the Fourth West Scipian War and a growing backlash to the ongoing Yarden peace negotiations was emerging.
A prominent Chareidi rabbi, Yezechiel Wein, met with other roshey yeshiva and together formed a political party, Torah Achdus, in July 1969 to advocate Chareidi interests, such as reforming or eliminating the Mamlachti schools, increasing kollel subsidies, and instituting stricter kosher standards in public spaces.
While the nascent Chareidi party supported the emerging Yarden peace negotiations (unlike others on the political right at the time), it sought to harness the growing religious and conservative backlash to the liberalizing and secularizing society of the 1950s and 1960s. Between 1970 and 1972, Torah Achdus won a raft of local city council seats in Chareidi neighborhoods in the big cities and and mayorships in Chareidi-majority towns. In the the 1974 midterms, the party ran independently as a right-wing force for the Knesset, spurning attempts by Conservative power-brokers to align with their candidates. The TA only elected two of their candidates, failing to elect eight others in Chareidi-heavy Knesset constituencies due to the political organization of more established parties and the lack of a sectarian political consciousness among Chareidi voters at that point.
In the run-up to the 1976 elections, Torah Achdus joined the new Right Bloc coalition. Wein had directly negotiated with the 1976 Conservative presidential nominee Binyamin Schwartz, who agreed with the Chareidim that the Mamlachti school system had to be dismantled as well as set a fixed Kollel subsidy per yeshiva family pegged to inflation. Schwartz won in an Electoral College landslide, winning the Yerushalayim and Central Districts, which contained large Chareidi blocs of voters, overwhelmingly. In 1978, the Mamlachti system was shuttered and a new private-centric and Dati-friendly school model instituted in its place.
As long as Schwartz or his Vice-President and successor, Michoel Citron, held the Presidential Palace, the Chareidi Bloc stayed allied with the Conservatives and the Right Bloc. In 1979, the Knesset passed a Chareidi-sponsored bill that set a stricter kosher standard for meat in public institutions, a major religious victory as the Chareidi and other Dati communities were increasingly moving towards reliance on glatt kosher as an universal norm.
After the Left Bloc took a majority in the Knesset in 1982 after the "six-year itch," Torah Achdus lobbied hard to defeat multiple attempts by anti-Chareidi figures in the Con-Libs to end inflation-pegged kollel subsidies, a major source of income for many Chareidi families and communities. While the Chareidim found common cause with the Conservatives and their mostly Dati Leumi and Chardal members, intra-religious tensions still simmered under the surface, meaning while Chareidi lawmakers backed the Right Bloc in general, they did not feel any long-term loyalty to the conservative coalition.
By the end of the Citron presidency in the late 1980s, many Torah Achdus Knesset members had started to form political alliances with the Con-Libs, who had moderated their liberal and secular politics to be more Dati-friendly. The Con-Libs, generally, stopped attacking kollel subsidies and mocking strict religious beliefs, instead opting to convince the Chareidi Bloc that a more activist government could leave their communities with a windfall in new state benefits. This message was attractive to many Chareidi voters and activists, as the community remained over all relatively poor and impoverished versus other sectors of society.
In an act labeled the "Great Betrayal" by the Conservatives, Torah Achdus endorsed the 1988 Con-Lib nominee Yosef Aronov, who won in that year's presidential election.