For the chareidi draft law, the time for talk is over
Freshman MK Boaz Bismuth, who’s just been elected chair of the Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee, is a Likud guy through and through — but he’s voted for United Torah Judaism in Tel Aviv municipal elections, which says something about his politics. He and I had a conversation about it several months ago.
“Why did I vote for UTJ?” Bismuth asked me rhetorically. “As someone who’s raising his kids here, I felt that we need to strengthen our Jewish identity, and UTJ was the most pro-Torah list on the ballot.”
Bismuth was elected by the Likud faction — with chareidi support — to replace Yuli Edelstein at the head of the defense committee. Outgoing chair Edelstein, a former Prisoner of Zion and current MK on behalf of the Likud, is blamed by the chareidim for stalling the draft law. Two years and 45 committee deliberations into the process of drafting the bill, the chareidim realized that Edelstein was playing them for suckers after he walked back the agreements he had reached with them on the eve of the Iran war.
Like so many of his Knesset colleagues, Bismuth began his career as a journalist. As editor-in-chief of Israel Hayom and a close associate of Republican mega-donors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Bismuth had an open channel to the White House during the first Trump administration, and he’d had been picked by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to serve as ambassador to Mauritania in the past. Now a Likud MK, he’s been promoted to chair of the key defense committee in a last-ditch attempt to save the right-wing coalition from itself.
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