JERUSALEM — Yitzhak Mordechai, the new centrist party’s candidate for prime minister, has wasted no time getting into the thick of campaigning.
This is particularly true regarding religious-secular relations, where the former defense minister has not hesitated to state his views in favor of the Orthodox.
“I would like, no less than anyone else, to see yeshiva students serving in the army,” the much-decorated former general told an audience Sunday night, bringing up a long-debated topic.
“But there is no way for the one camp to forcibly foist its views on the other,” he added. “The Orthodox cannot threaten the secular, and the secular cannot impose themselves on the Orthodox. The yeshiva boys should serve — but through dialogue, not through threats.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is also courting the Orthodox vote, is closely watching Mordechai’s stance on religion-state issues. Ehud Barak, the Labor Party’s candidate for prime minister, all but gave up Orthodox support with his strongly worded statements last year favoring a draft for yeshiva students.
In the 1996 election, Netanyahu took virtually all of the Orthodox vote in his race against former Prime Minister Shimon Peres. But the latest polls indicate that the Orthodox electorate is making a serious defection from the prime minister in favor of Mordechai.
Mordechai’s appeal to Orthodox voters became clear last week, following his controversial vote in the Knesset in favor of legislation requiring all members of local religious councils to abide by the rulings of the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate.
Prior to the vote, Mordechai had been intensely lobbied by the fervently religious Shas Party leader Aryeh Deri, who made it abundantly clear that a yes vote would put the centrist candidate in a very good position with Shas supporters and other traditional voters.
The bill passed by one vote. Mordechai, vigorously back-slapping legislators from the Shas Party and the United Torah Judaism bloc after the vote, insisted it was his vote that made the difference.
Roni Milo, a fellow member of the centrist party’s leadership and former Tel Aviv mayor, issued a statement after the vote deploring the outcome in the name of liberalism and pluralism.
The next day, Amnon Lipkin Shahak, another centrist party leader and former army chief, found himself bitterly criticized by liberal-leaning Jewish activists in New York, where he was seeking moral and financial support for the newly formed party.
Just the same, there has been no wavering and no backtracking on Mordechai’s part.
Milo is “not nearly as extreme as it sometimes seems,” Mordechai assured an interviewer over the weekend when asked about Milo’s outspoken anti-Orthodox statements when he first raised the centrist banner several months ago.
Reporters also have repeatedly asked Mordechai about his meeting last week, on the day after he was fired as Netanyahu’s defense minister, with Shas spiritual mentor Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.
Interviewers and the general public have been particularly intrigued by television footage of the burly ex-general kissing the sage’s beard.
“That’s me,” Mordechai replied with disarming simplicity. “It’s not an act or a show like with other politicians. These are parts of my personality, of my lifestyle.”
It is much too early to know whether these personal traits — his traditionalist beliefs and customs, and his salt-of-the-earth ways — are a key cause of Mordechai’s impressive showing in the polls.
The polls indicate that Netanyahu will win the first round of voting on May 17 — but with far less than the 50 percent needed to avoid a June 1 runoff.
Mordechai, meanwhile, emerged in two weekend polls as handily defeating Netanyahu in a two-way runoff.
And Mordechai’s party — which is still without a list of legislative candidates or a platform — won 15 of the 120 Knesset seats in the weekend surveys.
With Likud and Labor getting just 27 and 26 seats respectively in those same polls, the centrists appear to be making an impressive debut.