NEW YORK (JTA) — An American Orthodox Jewish group is defending Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to work with a far-right political party.
It is the first statement by a major American Jewish organization defending Netanyahu’s decision. Last week, Netanyahu orchestrated an agreement between the extremist Jewish Power and Jewish Home, a religious Zionist party. The merger will increase the united party’s chances of gaining enough votes to enter Knesset, Israel’s parliament.
An array of centrist and liberal American Jewish groups and religious movements has criticized the merger as giving legitimacy to a fringe, racist movement.
But the National Council of Young Israel, a traditionalist Orthodox association of 175 synagogues that tends to take hawkish stances on Israeli issues, defended the prime minister’s actions as a matter of political calculus.
Young Israel also noted that the Israeli Supreme Court said in 2015 that a Jewish Power candidate should not be barred from running because of the party’s platform.
“Prime Minister Netanyahu acted to get right-wing parties to merge in order to meet the threshold necessary to secure a victory in the election,” read a statement Monday by Farley Weiss, president of the National Council of Young Israel, to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We understand what Prime Minister Netanyahu did, and he did it to have ministers of the national religious and national union parties in his coalition.”
The statement stands in contrast to an alphabet soup of major Jewish groups that have condemned Jewish Power — from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to the American Jewish Committee to the Anti-Defamation League. In a rare instance of criticism of a sitting prime minister, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, called the…
