In the Knesset’s last summer sitting, a lobby met to advance a bill to create elected neighborhood councils. The proposals on the table and the survey presented alongside them turned on one question: at what level a disagreement in Israel can still be settled.
On July 21, the Knesset hosted the Lobby for Personal and Community Representation in Local Government, formed by Likud MK Amit Halevi at the initiative of the Derech Eretz movement and its research center, Dor Moriah.
Around the table were the movement’s city activists, Russian-speaking Israelis who wrote the bill under discussion. Boaz Bismuth, chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, briefed them on the security situation.
The lobby and the bill rest on one claim made by the movement’s leader, Rabbi Alexander Hayat. Israel’s Russian speakers, roughly a sixth of the Jewish population, are strong individually: engineers, physicians, entrepreneurs. They manage alone as long as they can, and when they can’t, there is no door to knock on.
One citizen cannot make a state office do what it is already obliged to do. Organized pressure can, and organized pressure needs a structure to carry it. Building those structures is what Derech Eretz does.
The session had two proposals before it. The first is the neighborhood councils bill, registered in the Knesset on May 25. It obliges a city to establish an elected council in each neighborhood, defines what the council decides, and gives it a fixed share of the municipal budget.
Municipal elections fall in 2028. If the law is on the books by then, Israelis will elect neighborhood councils on the same ballot as their mayors.
The second proposal concerns marriage, burial, and Jewish status determination. These are not private religious matters here but state procedures; without them, a citizen cannot start a family or bury a parent. For immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the procedure stalls: the Chief Rabbinate cannot read Soviet documents and the religious councils have no one who can.
Cases settled in a week for other Israelis take years. The lobby wants Russian-speaking rabbinic posts in those councils and a third chief rabbi, a Russian speaker, by amendment to the Chief Rabbinate Law.
None of this is an ethnic quota. It is a wider range of service, fitted to the social and religious diversity of Israelis. Until those structures exist, the work falls to Derech Eretz’s groups in Jerusalem, Rishon Lezion, Ashkelon, and other cities with large Russian-speaking populations, where religious and secular Israelis take cases one at a time: the school, the road, the park, the file stuck at the rabbinate. They do not stand in for the state. They help residents get an answer out of it.
The numbers are telling
The session's last item was polling: 1,006 respondents surveyed by Dor Moriah and Geocartography in late June. Asked to name the country’s most urgent problem, 26.4 % chose the economy, and the figure barely moves between secular, traditional, and religious Israelis – the one thing they share.
Ask what the state should rest on and the sharing stops: 76.8% of secular Israelis want a civil constitution, and 5.2% want Torah law; among religious Israelis, it is 67.3% for Torah law and 11.4% for a constitution.
Asked what actually decides their choice of party, only 9.6% point to the economy, the problem they had just called most urgent, and only the fourth reason to vote. First, at 30.9%, is the leader’s personality.
Each camp also believes the country runs by the other side’s rules. Among secular respondents, 42.8% see Israel as a religious state; among religious respondents, 49.8% call it secular – an argument in which both sides count themselves the loser has no endpoint.
Two-thirds are dissatisfied with the government, yet the coalition draws 32.1% against 44.1% for a Jewish opposition split among at least five camps, and nine in 10 decided voters will not move.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads the field at 29.2%, but his support is concentrated: 55.8% among religious Israelis and 45.5% among the traditional, against 16.3% among the secular. The support is also personal rather than political.
Among those who say the country is heading in the right direction, 60.9% call him the best candidate for prime minister, and 39.5% say they will vote Likud, a gap of 21 points between a leader and his own party among his own satisfied voters.
Some of these disagreements do reproduce at street level: whether a street closes on Shabbat divides neighbors as sharply as anything in the survey. What differs is not the disagreement but what can be done with it. At street level, the question is specific – the people entitled to settle it are a defined group, and a vote ends it.
Residents do this work now, through groups with no standing, no authority, and no money. The neighborhood councils bill supplies all three.
The writer is an expert at the Dor Moriah Analytical Center.