MERCAZ USA Newsletter — Spring 2010

Haredi Shas Party Joins WZO

For the first time in its 113-year history, an ultra-Orthodox Zionist party has joined the World Zionist Organization, the embodiment of secular Zionist ideology. The affiliation occurred when earlier this year, Shas's Council of Torah Sages, headed by the leading Sephardic halachic expert Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, approved joining the WZO as an Israeli Zionist party.

The condition for joining the WZO was for the Shas leadership to change its political platform to add in the principles of the 2004 Jerusalem Program, including the statement that Zionism means "strengthening Israel as a Jewish, Zionist and democratic state and shaping it as an exemplary society with a unique moral and spiritual character, marked by mutual respect for the multi-faceted Jewish people, rooted in the vision of the prophets, striving for peace and contributing to the betterment of the world".

Since the phrase "multi-faceted Jewish people" is understood as a euphemism for "religious pluralism", accepting the Jerusalem Program thereby binds Shas, at least theoretically, to uphold pluralism as a Jewish/Zionist value.

Shas will be participating in the 36th World Zionist Congress in June as one of the Israeli Zionist parties that comprise 38% of the 500 Congress delegates representing Israel. Israeli Zionist political parties – Labor, Likud, Kadima, Meretz, Yisrael Beinenu, Mizrachi (Orthodox Zionists) and Shas – will divide among themselves the 190 Israeli mandates according to the percentage of vote that they each received in the 2009 Israeli Knesset elections. Shas is expected to join a coalition of rightwing Zionist parties including Likud, Mizrachi and Yisrael Beitenu.

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