Something consequential is happening to Shas, the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox party that has been a pillar of Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition and, for decades, one of Israel’s most durable political forces.
Shas won 11 Knesset seats in 2022. Recent polls put it around seven. One veteran activist estimates its dependable base at perhaps four seats, with virtually everything beyond that in play. The question is why?
Founded under the spiritual leadership of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas created an unusual political family. Its core is Haredi, but its reach extends to traditional Sephardi and Mizrahi Israelis who are religiously observant or culturally traditional, strongly Zionist — and frequently serve in the IDF. Now those constituencies are colliding over military service.
Shas’ religious leadership has adopted an extraordinarily sweeping position. Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, Ovadia Yosef’s son and the party’s dominant spiritual authority, has declared that even Haredi men who are not studying Torah should not enlist.
But many rank-and-file Shas voters inhabit a different world. Their sons and daughters serve. Fathers report for reserve duty. After Oct. 7 and years of war, they have watched Israelis repeatedly leave families and jobs to defend the country.
Some find the leadership’s position offensive: Is their child’s service somehow religiously suspect? Others find it dispiriting: Why should one Jewish family repeatedly bear burdens another is instructed to avoid? Still others find it unfair and illogical: If Torah study justifies exemption, what justifies exempting someone who is not studying?
That makes this more than another dispute over conscription. Shas voters are being forced to reconcile religious authority with their own understanding of fairness, national responsibility and Judaism itself.
The newly launched Haredi Public party suggests this discontent reaches inside the Haredi community itself. It protects serious Torah study while insisting that those not studying full-time should serve, explicitly rejecting the premise that military service and an authentically Haredi life are incompatible. One prominent supporter, Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, describes its vision as a “new old Yiddishkeit.”
Whether it crosses the electoral threshold almost misses the point. It offers dissatisfied Haredim a way to challenge their political establishment without challenging their religious identity. That puts Aryeh Deri, Shas’ longtime political chairman and one of Israel’s shrewdest political survivors, in an extraordinary bind.
Hence the Kabuki theater. Yosef, after fiercely opposing Haredi enlistment, suddenly releases videos blessing IDF soldiers. Shas produces an advertisement showing a soldier welcomed home to his Haredi family for Shabbat. That is political sleight of hand, not resolution of the contradiction. Will Shas voters see through it?
For Netanyahu, where defectors go matters enormously. Those moving to Likud or Itamar Ben-Gvir largely remain within his bloc. Those moving to Gadi Eisenkot subtract from Netanyahu while strengthening an alternative.
And Eisenkot offers traditional Shas voters another escape hatch. Sephardi, Moroccan, traditional and a former IDF chief of staff, he allows them to remain religious, Sephardi and patriotic without accepting that loyalty to Torah requires political loyalty to Shas.
Deri has rescued Shas before. But this time he is fighting something more fundamental: the possibility that Shas voters may decide their religious identity, moral instincts and Zionist obligations no longer lead them to the same political conclusion.
If they do, it may be Netanyahu — not merely Shas — who pays the price.
