ZEHUT: Committed to our Platform

by Moshe Feiglin

This article appeared on the Arutz 7 website in Hebrew on 21 Adar II/March 28

What with all the attacks by rabbis of the sector and its public opinion leaders against the ZEHUT party and me, I preferred not to respond. The public has the tools to differentiate between pertinent criticism and a non-factual smear campaign.

I was pleased to see two critical articles last week that were not like the above, published in the B’Sheva newspaper. They were serious articles with pertinent questions. The first was called “A Problem of Identity” written by my accomplished friend, Attorney Doron Nir Tzvi. The second, called “The Truth in the Box,” was written by my accomplished friend, editor of the B’Sheva newspaper, Emanuel Shiloh.

I would like to give them serious answers to their concerns.

In his article, “A Problem of Identity,” Attorney Nir Tzvi claims that while he “depends on me not to disappoint the public with empty slogans,” the identity of the other ZEHUT candidates is not clear. Thus, out of concern that the precedent of Raful and his Knesset list - some of whom turned out to be disloyal to the Land of Israel -will not repeat itself, he prefers to vote for a party in which all the candidates are loyalt o the Land. In the article, “The Truth in the Box,” Emanuel Shiloh voices a similar concern, from a more essential angle: “I respect Feiglin as a smart, daring and original person...,” Shiloh wrote.“But it is hard to connect between the person who today declares that he will go for broke for legalization of light drugs and the person whose previous slogan was, “To perfect the world in the Kingdom of Heaven.”

I understand the concern of Attorney Nir Tzvi regarding the loyalty of the unknown candidates. We all remember precedents and it is clear why people want to err on the side of caution. The problem of loyalty, however, was not isolated to Raful and his candidates. A short time after I was elected to the Knesset, Netanyahu announced that he intended to release hundreds of terrorists in four installments. I announced that if he would do so, I would vote against the state budget –which is tantamount to a no-confidence vote in the Knesset. I attempted to convince the Land of Israel loyalists in the Knesset to join me. I went from the Jewish Home party, to the Likud, to Yisrael Beiteinu. I wrote heartfelt letters. A Likud minister said to me in a moment of honesty: If you get two more MKs to join you, he won’t release any terrorists. In the end, I was the only MK to vote against the budget – not Orit Struck, the loyal settler from Hebron, not the loyal settlers Elkin and Edelstein from the Likud and not the loyal settler Lieberman from Yisrael Beiteinu.

I experienced the same phenomenon when MK Litzman, who was in the Opposition at the time, proposed the Jerusalem Defense Bill. According to the proposed bill, any negotiations on Jerusalem would be contingent upon the signed agreement of 80 Knesset Members. Minister Tzippy Livni, who spoke in the name of the government, admitted, for all practical purposes, that negotiations over Jerusalem were being conducted all the time. Nonetheless, the loyal rightist bloc Knesset Members snuck out of the Knesset plenum before the vote, leaving me alone as the only supporter of the bill from the Coalition. They even encouraged the Arab MKs to enter the plenum to topple the bill together with Lapid, Labor and Meretz. If the bill had passed, Trump’s current plan to establish an American embassy in Abu Dis, (a.k.a. Palestinian Jerusalem) and for surrender of Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, coming up right after the elections –the plan that Netanyahu announced that he is anxiously awaiting –would have been impossible.

True, in the 20th Knesset, Naftali Bennett passed his own bill to “protect Jerusalem”, but as usual, it is a fake, deceptive bill that is not a significant barrier to re-division of the city.

Do you understand, Doron? It didn’t only happen with Raful and his disloyal party.

It continued to happen with the most loyal of the loyal-and there are many more examples. Because ultimately, political framework and mentality determine loyalty much more than personal ideology. ZEHUT stands on its own two feet and did not give in to the temptation to jump into the warm embrace of the bloc that is in Netanyahu’s pocket, As a result, ZEHUT has its own power. Its Knesset Members –who are all committed to the loyal platform of the party –also have the political backing to take action to implement it. If they want to continue their political careers, they must be re-elected by the party members next time around. A vote in the Knessetthat counters ZEHUT’sloyal platform is a slap in the face to the party members who elected them and will be extremely detrimental to their chances to be re-elected the next time.

As to Emanuel Shiloh’s concern about the difference in my identity-views from Zo Artzeinu days to my liberty-views today? Tomer Rashkovtzki of the Technion, had a big part in editing the two books that we have published in the past two years, “Israel’s Quixotic Quest for Normalcy” and our platform book, “To be a Free Jew.” The ‘Quixotic Quest’book is actually an expansion of a description of our Zo Artzeinu days updated until now, while the ‘To be a Free Jew’ book is ZEHUT’s platform book. For Tomer, who does not wear a kippah and connected to me only over the past few years, the Zo Artzeinu story was completely new. One evening about a year ago, Tomer stopped me on a Tel Aviv sidewalk on my way to party HQ. “After a deep reading of both books,” he said to me, “the book from then and the book from today –you can see how ZEHUT’s platform is encapsulated in the Zo Artzeinu days.”

The worldview that sees the state as belonging to the citizen and not vice versa is what made the Zo Artzeinu protests then and my determined stance on the Land of Israel, later, in the Knesset –possible. The rightist bloc, whose worldview does not include liberty, lacks the basic ability to set borders for the regime and to defend our Land when push comes to shove.

You can rest assured, Emanuel. Liberty and identity do not contradict each other, but rather, cultivate each other. Without identity, there is no liberty.

But the opposite is also true. Without liberty, there is no identity and safeguarding the Land of Israel becomes impossible.