Elazar Stern, the former IDF general and member of the Yesh Atid Party, was invited to give a lecture a few months ago at the headquarters of one of Israel’s security agencies.
In his talk, Stern gave an overview of the challenges and opportunities he currently sees in Israel, and mentioned one of the issues closest to his heart: conversion.
When he had served as head of the IDF’s Education Corps in 1999, he told the audience, he founded Nativ, the military conversion program that by 2020 had converted 11,000 soldiers. Every day, he told the security agency members, 17 children are born who are not recognized as Jewish by the state. Had the army not established Nativ, he said, the 11,000 soldiers would have been sidelined by the country.
After he finished speaking, someone in one of the back rows raised his hand and asked Stern if the 11,000 converts are recognized today as halachic Jews by the Chief Rabbinate. Stern began to answer by recalling his meetings on that issue with Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, founder of Shas and a former chief rabbi. Suddenly, a woman in another row raised her hand and asked to speak.
Stern wanted to finish his train of thought and said he would call on the woman soon, but when she persisted, he let her speak. “This is the first time I am meeting you,” the woman said. “But I want you to know that I have two children who are Jewish because of you.”
The woman, it turned out, had been through the Nativ course at the age of 22, and today continues to serve her country as a member of one of Israel’s security agencies.
Stern was obviously moved. This week, when we spoke, he recalled this story for two reasons. First because on Thursday night begins Shavuot, a holiday that highlights the way the Jewish people are meant to accept and treat converts. The second reason, said Stern, is because conversion sits alongside a long list of key issues for Israel that are going to go nowhere under the new Likud-Blue and White government.
I have known Stern since his army days and had the opportunity to interview him in 2008 just days before he stepped down as head of the IDF’s Manpower Directorate and hung up his uniform for the last time. That July day we spent together started in the North at a lecture he gave to a group of IDF officers heading to visit Nazi death camps in Poland.
Stern was – and still is – a great storyteller. He told the officers about his Holocaust-survivor parents, and how his mother used to call him in the middle of the night to make sure he was okay; and he recalled how the Saudi and Kuwaiti military officers whom he studied with at the National Defense University in Washington in the 1990s couldn’t understand why he wasn’t shaving during the nine days before Tisha Be’av.
But when I spoke with Stern this week, he was in no joking mood. Israel, he warned, is heading in a dangerous direction, and the new government – established by his former fellow generals Benny Gantz and Gabi Ashkenazi – will achieve nothing but the legitimization of corruption and national division. The fate of state conversions – stuck because of the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) stronghold over matters of religion and state – are just one of the country’s problems, he lamented.
Stern took Gantz and Ashkenazi’s decision to break away from Yesh Atid particularly hard. While he had served alongside both men and sat with them on the IDF General Staff, Ashkenazi is more than just a former commander. He is a close friend whom Stern spent over a year trying to convince to enter politics.
When I asked him how he took the news, Stern recalled in detail what led to Gantz’s sudden decision to present his candidacy for speaker of the Knesset, which then led to the dissolution of the merger with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid.
“The possibility of unity was always there, and it was known that while Lapid and Bogie [Telem leader Moshe Ya’alon] were not willing to sit with a prime minister under indictment, Gantz and Ashkenazi were less insistent on this,” Stern recalled. “I personally knew their positions, and they knew my position that in principle I was in favor of a unity government.”
On March 25, former speaker of the Knesset Yuli Edelstein refused a High Court order to hold a vote on his successor. Blue and White’s presumed candidate was supposed to have been Meir Cohen, a member of Yesh Atid and former welfare minister. The plan was for Cohen to become speaker, and for the party to bring legislation to a vote that would prevent an MK under indictment from serving as prime minister. The idea, Stern explained, was to create leverage over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and then establish a unity government under far better conditions.
On that day in March, Stern decided to enter the Knesset plenum to hear Edelstein’s speech, which he thought would be an apology for refusing the court order. Instead, Edelstein dug in his heels and continued to attack the court, and then adjourned the session after he finished speaking.
Stern and some of his Blue and White colleagues remained inside the plenum to ensure that Edelstein wouldn’t lock them out and prevent a vote on his successor. After about half an hour though, Gantz walked in.
“We don’t let the sheep lead the shepherd,” the Blue and White leader told the MKs. “We don’t barricade ourselves inside.” While Stern suspected something was amiss, he figured the original plan – to elect Cohen – was still in play.
The drama continued the following day when Stern heard during a meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Gantz had submitted his candidacy for speaker. At first it didn’t make sense. But when he went to Gantz’s Knesset office and spoke to him, Stern started to understand what had happened. He believed that because of Edelstein’s decision to ignore the court ruling, negotiations with Likud had been called off. What he did not know but would later discover was that a separate team – led by Gantz and Ashkenazi – was continuing to negotiate with Netanyahu behind Yesh Atid’s back.
The whole sequence of events, he said this week, was one big missed opportunity.
“It was all about having patience and waiting a week,” he explained. “If we had elected Meir Cohen and put the bill that someone under indictment cannot be a prime minister, Bibi would not have gone to an election, but would have agreed to a unity government that would have been better for Israel.”
One option, for example, was a Yesh Atid proposal that Netanyahu remain prime minister for six months while Blue and White supported him until the end of the coronavirus crisis. Under that proposal, the party would receive only two ministries, defense and justice.
“I feel sadness and disappointment since the message people will get from all of this – that values and principles are not important – will take years to fix,” he said of his friends’ decision to join Netanyahu. “I have respect for people who were IDF chiefs of staff, but people are not perfect; and in this case, in the clash of values that they encountered, they gave the wrong weight to the wrong values.”
In the days following the split of the party in March, Stern had difficulty sleeping – there was pressure being put on him by Gantz’s bloc to leave Yesh Atid and join them.
But Stern refused. He said that joining such a government would have been a surrender of his own values, something he would not have been able to live with.
“After this, how will people look at the lists in the next election? What will they say? No one will care about platforms? No one will look at the list? What are we teaching future generations? I feel that I have gone from the most respected place in the country – the IDF – to the lowest: politics,” he lamented.
Blue and White, I reminded Stern, will read what he says, but will then remind him that politics is the art of what is possible, not what is perfect. Gantz, I said, was concerned about COVID-19, wanted to avoid a fourth election and felt that the only option was a unity government with Netanyahu.
Stern refused to accept that. For him, principles always come first. Politics comes next.
“I don’t count the days, but when Benny switches with Bibi, what will change?” he asked. “There will still be over 36 ministers and deputy ministers; there will still be a government that does not change anything regarding religion and state, corruption and equality; [Amir] Ohana will still be the public security minister; and Miri Regev will become the foreign minister.
“There will still be two residences and two offices for the prime ministers; the state will continue to fund two homes in Caesarea [Netanyahu’s private residence] and Rosh Ha’ayin [Gantz’s private residence] and protect the children of the two PMs; and Blue and White will continue to be quiet when Likud attacks the Supreme Court and the police commissioner and the attorney-general.
“So what is this all for?”