My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  One evening two ultra-Orthodox young men in long black coats knocked on the door. They had heard that the Deri boys were talented and suggested that two of them enroll in a religious boarding school in Netanya. Esther Deri was taken aback. She knew nothing about ultra-Orthodoxy, and the idea of sending her boys away scared her. It seemed inhuman. But her fear of drugs, prostitution, and street gangs was even stronger. After a long, heartbreaking deliberation, Esther deposited her eldest, Yehuda, and her gifted Aryeh in the hands of the two young men. The two brilliant Moroccan boys were sent to the Sanz boarding school in Netanya, where they were totally cut off from their sister and brothers and mother and broken father.

  The rabbi at the Sanz Yeshiva was an impressive spiritual figure who immediately captured Aryeh Deri’s heart. But the place itself was dilapidated, dirty, and miserable. Aryeh did not understand why he was being punished, why at the age of nine and a half he had been taken away from his mother. At night he would cry bitterly. During the day, he tried to escape. He collected bottles from trash cans, sold them back to the local grocery store, and with the money bought a bus ticket back to Bat Yam. At home he cried and persuaded his mother to let him stay—until the rabbi arrived and told Esther that her boy was a promising Torah scholar. Looking around the dismal housing estate, she agreed to place her boy in the care of the rabbi once again.

  In the meantime, Esther began working shifts in a trade-union-owned textile factory in Bat Yam. Eliahu got out of bed and began cutting raincoats for a trade-union-owned haberdashery. Honor did not return, and neither did plenitude, and there was not much happiness. But after the abrupt transition from Morocco to Israel that had initially crushed the Deris, the family was making a new life for itself—living the gray, depressing routine of the Oriental-Israeli proletariat.

  Aryeh, the child prodigy, took another road. He spent his first summer in the State of Israel in the miserable ultra-Orthodox boarding school in Netanya. He escaped, returned, and escaped again. Months later, he managed to get himself transferred to another ultra-Orthodox boarding school, and then to yet another. In Hadera, living conditions were disgraceful, too, and loneliness was devastating, but the ten-year-old became an observant Jew. The headmaster, Rabbi Shukrun, treated Aryeh like his own son and took a personal interest in his education. When Aryeh went home once a month he watched Arab movies on television on Friday evenings and played soccer on the Sabbath, but in school he wore a yarmulke and studied the Talmud. Three years later, he was transferred to the Sephardic Porat Yosef Yeshiva in Jerusalem, and two years after that, he moved to a mixed Sephardic-Ashkenazi yeshiva. At the age of sixteen he was accepted to the prestigious Hebron Yeshiva. After seven and a half years in inferior and mediocre Sephardic institutions, Aryeh Machluf Deri had reached the Eton of the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox world.

  Hebron was also the school of David Yosef, the son of Israel’s chief Sephardic rabbi, Ovadia Yosef. The chief Sephardic rabbi’s son, a mediocre student, needed the help and guidance of the brilliant and charismatic Deri, and in return he suggested that Aryeh become tutor to his younger brother. At the age of eighteen, the son of Eliahu and Esther Deri was taken into the Yosef household. Ten years after the ship Moledet docked in Haifa with a spoiled secular-traditional boy from Meknes on deck, Aryeh Deri was an up-and-comer in the royal court of Israel’s Sephardic Jewry.

  Aryeh’s dream was to establish an elite yeshiva for Sephardic students. But life in the chief rabbi’s household gave him a taste for politics. After Deri married Yaffa, a beautiful orphan, a friend convinced him to devote his life to public service. His self-proclaimed mission was to persuade the Sephardic rabbi Yosef and the Ashkenazi super-rabbi Elazar Shach to co-sponsor a new Sephardic religious party. Thus Shas was born. In 1984, at the age of twenty-five, Aryeh Deri ruled over an Oriental ultra-Orthodox party that garnered four seats in the Knesset in its debut election campaign. He was about to change the face of Israel.

  At the age of twenty-six, Deri was a powerful adviser to the minister of the interior. At twenty-seven, he was director general of the Ministry of the Interior, and at twenty-nine, he became minister of the interior. Though he did not possess any experience in public administration or any previous knowledge of Israeli society, Aryeh Deri became a star overnight. He advanced the cause of both ultra-Orthodox Jews and Oriental Jews. But because he was a dove, the Left took a shine to him. Because he assisted the settlers, the Right appreciated him. And because the agenda he set forth at the Ministry of the Interior benefited many outside his constituencies, he gained the respect of business and media. Deri managed to promote the two minority communities he represented without alienating other communities. At the age of thirty he was the first ultra-Orthodox Oriental Jew to break into Israel’s inner circle of power. He was the most electrifying, promising figure of a new Israel.

  In June 1990, Israel’s most powerful daily newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, published a series of investigative articles claiming that Deri was corrupt. The state comptroller and then the police opened inquiries. Deri fought back with a vengeance. He attacked Yediot Aharonot, the state comptroller, and the police. The people’s hero became the people’s enemy. He was perceived not only as a bribe taker but as one who willfully disregarded the rule of law. Gone was the affection of the Left, gone was the support of the Right, gone was the acceptance by the elite. Aryeh Deri retreated to within the bounds of the one domain that stuck by him: the traditional Oriental community.

  For three years Deri lived a double life. On the one hand, he remained a successful minister of the interior who contributed greatly to Israel of the early 1990s. He was instrumental in the absorption of mass Russian immigration, in preventing Israeli involvement in the first Gulf War, and in maintaining a crucial and courageous alliance with Prime Minister Rabin. On the other hand, he had lost the legitimacy of a normative political figure. Therefore, he devoted his exceptional energy to the construction of a parallel Israeli universe: a religious Oriental world funded by the government it challenged and undermined. The Shas leader used the political power he still had to build a sectarian education system and a sectarian welfare system that would supplant the dysfunctional universal system of Israel’s decaying welfare state. He took advantage of his management and organization-building abilities to establish an alternative kingdom of the oppressed and downtrodden. As enlightened Israel rejected him, he rejected enlightened Israel. Rather than being a unifier and a healer, Aryeh Deri became the Oriental leader who would lead the Oriental-traditionalist revolt against the secular Ashkenazi state that Zionism had founded.

  The revolt’s first eruption occured in the 1996 election campaign. These were the years of the Oslo Accords. The government was the government of peace. In the upper echelons of Israeli society, the feeling was that Israeli secularism was back in power. But in the lower echelons, the revolt of Israel’s oppressed Jews was simmering. Nationally, the movement’s icon was Benjamin Netanyahu; ethnically, its identity was channeled through Shas. Deri understood this. He saw the latent potential embodied in cultural discontent. He also saw the fear gripping Israel when the peace promise was swept away by a wave of terrorism. That’s why he offered his voters something else: something mystical. Deri rediscovered Rabbi Yitzhak Kaduri, a hundred-year-old Kabbalistic mystic, and made him the star of the election campaign. Kaduri talismans and blessings were handed out en masse, and the ancient rabbi was flown by helicopter from town to town to address rallies of desperately poor traditional Oriental Jews who clung to his every, often unintelligible, word. By using Kaduri and Kabbalah, Deri got a quarter of a million votes, and ten seats in the Knesset from Israelis who had rejected the secular progress that had established the state. He took many Sephardic Jews back to their traditional mystic roots, a source of both pride and consolation.

  The revolt’s second eruption came in late April 1997. Israel’s secular and dovish elites regarded the Netanyahu-Deri government as illegitimate. Deri was fighting for his life in court. Suddenl
y, on Passover Eve, the state decided to indict Deri on suspicion of persuading Prime Minister Netanyahu to appoint a pliant attorney general in the hope that he could evade further corruption charges. The police had recommended breach-of-trust charges against Netanyahu and other Ashkenazi suspects in the affair, but unlike the Sephardic Deri, none of them was charged. The outcome was outrage. In the Hebrew University’s stadium, across from the Knesset and the Supreme Court, tens of thousands of Shas supporters gathered to cheer Deri and to identify with him. Ethnic civil war was close at hand.

  But Deri restrained himself and his people. He told the immense, angry crowd not to resort to violence. But the words he chose to use on that blazing hot day were perceived as his farewell to the state and to Zionism. “The vision of Zionism has failed,” he said.

  Now secular Israelis are afraid that Shas will change the secular character of the state. They call themselves Zionists, but they are not really Zionists. Their movement is a movement of heresy. They see our fathers and mothers as primitives. They want to convert them. They sent them to remote towns and villages where life was hard. They gave their children a good-for-nothing education. Until we came and began taking care of all these people who were suffering in all these remote places. That’s why they are afraid of us. That’s why they persecute us. And this persecution is both ethnic and religious. But the more they humiliate us, the more we will grow. We shall change the character of the State of Israel.

  The revolt’s third eruption comes in the spring and summer of 1999. On March 17, 1999, the Jerusalem District Court finds Aryeh Machluf Deri guilty of taking bribes amounting to $155,000. A week later, he is sentenced to four years in prison. In an irregular move, the reading of the court’s decision is transmitted on the radio in a live broadcast lasting for nearly two hours. Not only do the judges convict Deri but they describe him as corrupt and malicious. When he emerges from the courthouse, his supporters are despondent. It seems he is politically dead. But within hours, Aryeh Deri gathers strength. With elections only two months away, he decides to make his own tragedy the main issue of the election campaign. He locks himself in his office with a videographer and gives the speech of his life. “J’accuse,” he cries. For two hours, two narratives merge as he settles his own score with the rule of law and settles the score of Sephardic Judaism with the State of Israel. Aryeh Machluf Deri is now the symbol of the Oriental narrative: of rejection, humiliation, and persecution; of the unwillingness of the secular Ashkenazi establishment to honor and respect traditional Oriental Jews; of the exclusion of the Jewish-Israeli other.

  Deri’s j’accuse is a hit. To meet demand, tens of thousands of video-cassettes are produced in Europe daily and flown to Israel overnight. This time there is no need for Kaduri’s talismans. There is not much interest in Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, either. The election campaign is all about Deri. Development towns, impoverished boroughs, and remote villages are on fire. Everybody wants to see Deri, to touch Deri, to identify with Deri. While one Israel convicts him, another finds him innocent and makes him a hero. A surge of protest arises out of the Israeli ethnic divide. The trauma of arrival in the 1950s, the agony of absorption in the 1960s, the sense of discrimination in the 1970s, and the flickers of protest in the 1980s now come together in mass support for the leader of the Oriental revolution who has just been criminally convicted. Deri is no longer just a politician, he is a martyr. He becomes the bearer of the cross of Oriental pain and tragedy. The 430,000 votes he and his party receive sixty days after the court reads aloud its damning decision brings the Oriental revolt to its apex. In June 1999 almost every sixth Israeli gives his vote to a revolutionary leader who challenges the existing order and has been sentenced to four years in jail. Shas gains seventeen seats in the Knesset, up from ten in the previous election.

  In July 2000, Israel’s Supreme Court rejects Deri’s appeal but reduces his sentence to three years, finding that the bribe he received from his yeshiva friends was only sixty thousand dollars. Questions are raised: If so little is left of the original indictment after a decade-long legal battle, is Deri’s unprecedented punishment still justifiable? Are there really no other senior Israeli politicians who received illicit funds from friends without being punished at all? But the law is the law, and the sentence is now final.

  On September 3, 2000, the first day of the new school year, Aryeh Deri takes his young daughters to the Sephardic elementary school he founded in Jerusalem and named after Margalit Yosef, the late wife of the chief Sephardic rabbi. Facing the TV cameras he bids farewell to his three weeping girls. From school he goes to prison. Shas supporters want their leader to enter prison not as a felon but as a king: tens of thousands are waiting to support him as he exits Jerusalem, and traffic on the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv highway comes to a halt as a convoy of nearly a thousand cars and buses, led by a cavalcade of motorcycles, follows Deri from the capital to Maasiyahu Prison. Outside the prison, tens of thousands more gather. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef assures the crowds that just like the biblical Joseph, Deri will leave prison to become king of Israel. Deri himself asks for forgiveness but swears he has not broken the law and promises he will not crack. Escorted by a phalanx of policemen, with his acolytes chanting their support, Deri walks through the prison gates and bids farewell to his wife, Yaffa, and his parents. And when night comes, as he lies on his narrow iron bunk bed in his private nine-square-meter windowless cell, he buries his face in his hands and listens to his admirers singing outside the prison walls. He pictures the distraught faces of his wife and parents, and he thinks about his long journey. Suddenly he can’t take it anymore. He cracks. After ten turbulent years, he cries into the night just as he used to cry at boarding school: “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

  “So what is the crux of your story?” I ask Deri ten years later. “And what is the crux of the Oriental Israeli story? Do the two really converge?”

  We are sitting in the out-of-the way Jerusalem office to which Aryeh Deri retreats to be on his own, to think. The walls are covered with photographs of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and other lesser-known Sephardic rabbis. On the shelves are volumes of the Bible, the Mishnah, and the Talmud. On the desk are yesterday’s papers. After he makes me strong black coffee, Deri suggests I try some of the exquisite Belgian chocolates he has just received from a friend. Then he sits down, strokes his trim beard, pats his black yarmulke, and looks up at me. His eyes light up; he is ready, relaxed, almost at peace. Years after his incarceration, he no longer feels rage. From his black leather armchair he can recount his own biography with calm and perspective. At times it seems even he is surprised. He cannot believe that so much has happened in his life in such a short period of time, cannot believe that his life has turned into such a dramatic tale. “Unbelievable,” he mutters, more to himself than to me. But when I press him to tell me more, his eyes narrow and he chokes up.

  “I am not the typical Jewish-Oriental Israeli,” Deri tells me. “The vast majority of immigrants from the Arab countries arrived in the 1950s, whereas I arrived only in 1968. The great traumas of most Arab-speaking immigrants were the indiscriminant spraying with DDT that they all received upon arrival and the degrading immigrant camps that I did not experience. But when I arrived in Bat Yam in the late 1960s, I saw all around me the damage wrought by the 1950s. I saw a splintered Oriental society.

  “What happened is quite clear,” Deri elaborates. “Oriental-Jewish culture was founded on three pillars: the community, the synagogue, and the father. The father was very strong—too strong. He was the family’s provider and king. He told his wife what to do. He told his children what to study and how to behave. Even when modernization came, with its French and English influences, the father and the rabbi remained dominant. Religion, tradition, and patriarchy preserved the Oriental-Jewish community for a thousand years. We did not go through European-style secularization. We didn’t have Western enlightenment and a revolt against religion. We lived a life that combined religion, tradition, and rudimentary m
odernity. We looked up to the rabbi and feared the father, and thus we survived as a community.

  “On arrival in Israel,” Deri says, “the communities were dispersed. There was an intentional policy of dispersion. The rabbi lost his authority, the community disintegrated, and the synagogue was very much weakened. But worst of all is what happened to the father. The father figure was broken. Here he could not provide for his family as he had in Morocco or Iraq. Here he didn’t have the authority he had in Tunisia or Libya. He lost his bearings. He was depressed. He ceased to be relevant.

  “This was our crisis, too,” Deri says. “When we arrived in Israel, there was no community, no synagogue, and no rabbi. My father was mortified. He understood that what had happened to our neighbors was about to happen to us. The family sank into miserable poverty. We children began to misbehave and use foul language. A cousin of ours was killed in a shoot-out between rival street gangs. What saved us was our mother. After the initial shock, she realized she couldn’t rely on our father, so she gathered enough strength to act on her own. Because she is a wise, strong woman, she locked us at home so we wouldn’t stray. But when she realized this wasn’t enough, she consented to the two rabbis who knocked on her door and sent us to boarding school. Personally, emotionally, this was horrific for her. But because she loved us so much she did not let her heart overrule her head. She didn’t quite know where she was sending us. She didn’t know we would become ultra-Orthodox. But she knew we needed a social framework that would save us from the streets.”

  “What you are saying,” I challenge Deri, “is that it’s all accidental. Your parents were more secular than religious, more modern than traditional. They loved Humphrey Bogart, they danced the pasodoble. So had it not been for the young rabbis who knocked on your door, you might not have been religious at all. If a fine secular institution had come knocking, you might have become the leader of a renewed social-democratic Labor.”