Blue and White to target moderate religious Zionists
Campaign comes after New Right’s unity deal
The Blue and White Party is set to embark on a campaign to attract moderate religious-Zionist voters, following the unity deal on Monday between the liberal New Right Party and the hardliners of Bayit Yehudi and National Union.
Religious-Zionist candidates in Blue and White believe that liberal religious-Zionist voters will be turned off by the strongly conservative nature of the Bayit Yehudi and National Union, which could bolster support for Benny Gantz’s party from the sector.
According to Blue and White MK Yoaz Hendel, the party took approximately two Knesset seats’ worth of votes from religious-Zionist community in the April election, and the new political circumstances creates potential for more votes from the mainstream and liberal parts of the community.
The campaign will be headed by Hendel together with religious-Zionist MKs Elazar Stern, Yehiel Tropper and Orit Farkash-Hacohen, and will target specific communities where moderate religious-Zionists live, such as Givat Shmuel, Ra’anana, Rehovot and Modi’in, among others.
Hendel said that religious-Zionists in the Israeli-Anglo community would be another community that Blue and White will target. The campaign will include ads on religious-Zionist websites and digital platforms, as well as parlor meetings and events specifically in the strongholds of moderate religious-Zionist voters.
Speaking to The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday, Hendel said that one of the primary focuses of the campaign would be to place Blue and White as advocates for the traditional “state-oriented” philosophy of the religious-Zionist sector. He said the sector has been eroded in recent years by hardline rabbis, politicians, and various organizations harshly criticizing state institutions in public, such as the IDF, Shin Bet, state attorney’s office and others.
He added that the tolerance of corruption by some figures in the sector was another aspect of the erosion of this state-oriented philosophy.
“There is a great lack of ethics in the way corruption has been discussed as something trivial, and setting a personal example as something trivial,” said Hendel. “A state-oriented philosophy, integrity, setting a personal example, are the values which the religious-Zionist community was educated on and we cannot give up on them.”
The MK said that the excuse for such positions was politically based so as to keep the Right in power and preserve Israel’s hold on all of “the Land of Israel,” but argued that this was not justifiable.
REGARDING POLICIES and religion and state issues, Hendel said that the agenda of the religious-Zionist community on such issues was not being advanced by the current religious parties.
“The interest of the religious-Zionist community is not to let the ultra-Orthodox have a monopoly in the Chief Rabbinate and to let religion and state issues become the target of hate for all Israelis so that the number of marriages through the Chief Rabbinate decreases as we have seen in recent years,” he said.
The Blue and White MK said that his party would work through the Education Ministry to support, encourage and incentivize young women from the religious-Zionist sector to enlist to the IDF, a phenomenon that has been fiercely resisted by hardline rabbinic leaders.