Jan. 19, 2010
Greer Fay Cashman , THE JERUSALEM POST
IT HAD all the trappings of an election rally. They played the stirring campaign song. They stood up and cheered, and speaker after speaker came to the stage to praise the leader whose philosophy was also extolled in a documentary film. It was the third annual Jewish Leadership dinner at the Leonardo City Plaza Hotel in the heart of the Israel diamond complex. The ballroom was full to capacity, and MKs Yariv Levin and Danny Danon came to speak of the influence of the leader whom they hoped to see in the next Knesset. The leader in question was Moshe Feiglin, who is offering an alternative to current political norms and whose credo is to return the country to the people and to lead the state on a path of authentic Jewish values.
Feiglin is the nemesis of Prime Minister Netanyahu, who tried unsuccessfully to have him ousted from the party, or at least to prevent him from running for the Knesset. However the law was on Feiglin's side, and he did run in the Likud primaries in which he received 23.4 percent of the votes which put him in the 20th slot on the list. The reason that he is not an MK is that he was demoted to 36th place, which from a religious standpoint gives him much reason for hope because 36 is twice 18, and 18 is the gematria for life.
Speaking of Feiglin's faction in Likud, Levin said: "The target is not to get to the Knesset, but to the government." In fact most speakers referred to Feiglin as the next prime minister, and master of ceremonies Shmuel Sackett, who founded the movement with him, noted that attendance at the dinner was twice as large as last year. Both Levin and Danon were critical of the building freeze in settlements and declared that this was not the way of Likud.
When Feiglin got up to address the crowd, Sackett asked waiters to leave the room. Feiglin remonstrated mildly, saying: "You should have allowed them to stay. They might have learned something." The message that he wanted to convey was one of hope, direction and goals with a leadership "that will take us from the depths to which Israel has fallen, back to the heights."
Listing some of Israel's many accomplishments, Feiglin asked: "How is it that a nation that is so successful is losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the world? How can it be that [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad and his cohorts are free to go anywhere they want in the world, while Israeli government ministers are in some countries under threat of being arrested for war crimes?" The reason for delegitimization and growing anti-Semitism had nothing to do with the Israel-Arab conflict, he said, "but because we suffer a leadership which has no faith."
Feiglin said that a succession of Israeli leaders had abandoned Jewish values, but he was optimistic that his movement would lead a nationwide return to such values. Explaining his unflagging optimism, Feiglin noted that "everyone said that the Iron Curtain would never come down - but it did."
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