Dignified discourse

onday will not go down as a red-letter day in the Knesset.

It began in the morning with a sexist, misogynistic remark directed at Idit Silman, Yamina’s head of the Knesset Arrangements Committee, and ended in the late evening hours with haredi MKs saying they will not take part in the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee because the new elected head of the committee is Labor’s Gilad Kariv, a reform rabbi.

In other words: new government, same old Knesset – and not exactly a shining example of dignified debate or shared purpose. The MKs are well within their rights to disagree with one another, even passionately and vehemently. They cross a redline, however, when they degrade and belittle one another. That is going too far.

And that is exactly what the Likud’s Miki Zohar and United Torah Judaism’s Meir Porush did when speaking to and about Silman and Kariv.

Zohar started the circus by coming late into the Arrangements Committee, interrupting the proceedings and – when Silman refused to stop the meeting to answer a question he asked – shouted, “Who are you anyway? Answer me like a good girl.”

Zohar, who is all of six months older than the 40-year-old Silman, would never have so belittled a male MK by saying, “Answer me like a good boy.” Yet he had no compunction about speaking in such a condescending manner to Silman, who not only heads the Arrangements Committee but is also the chairwoman of the coalition.

Silman, along with her Yamina colleague Nir Orbach, has come under withering attacks and even death threats over the last few weeks for remaining loyal to party head Naftali Bennett and not bolting from the party, which would have deprived him of the ability to form a government with Foreign Minister Yair Lapid.

While Zohar later apologized for his comment to Silman, this was not the first sexist comment hurled at the new MK. Last week Porush shouted at her: “You’re a little girl, you can’t call me to order.”

Silman responded to Zohar on Twitter: “They call me a little girl. Once, twice, three times. Then I realized that this is the method. That there is a guiding hand here. Kindergarten tactics. But this time it will not work for them. We are here to work.”

In an indication of how petty the behavior toward Silman and Orbach has become, MK Simcha Rotman (Religious Zionists) markedly refused to shake the hand of Orbach at an event in Lod on Thursday.

Newly minted MK Rotman needs to realize that he is not in a playground where if kids don’t like someone they give them the “silent treatment,” and that parliamentarians are expected to live up to a higher, more mature standard of behavior.

Forget a higher standard: How about just basic decency? Disagree with Orbach, believe he is mistaken – but not to shake his hand because he is doing what he thinks is right and what he views is in the country’s best interest is churlish, childish behavior.

If the behavior toward Silman and Orbach was not bad enough, one haredi MK after another took to the podium late Monday evening to excoriate Kariv for no other reason than his religious belief – the fact that he is a reform rabbi. Porush likened the reform movement to pigs who change their hooves and say they are “pure.”

His colleague, Moshe Gafni, went so far as to say that the haredim would not take part in the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee because Kariv now heads it. That type of behavior is as deplorable as it is utterly unacceptable, and would be akin to MKs not having anything to do with Gafni because he is ultra-Orthodox. Had anyone done that, the haredi politicians would accuse them of antisemitism.

In a country as diverse as Israel, where good people who care about the future of the state have sincere differences and widely varying views, a modicum of respect and decency in discourse is imperative.

This is not just a matter of being polite – it is a basic building block of healthy social discourse that allows people from vastly different backgrounds and with very different beliefs to interact with one another. If this is necessary in the street, workplace and public domain, it is downright critical in the Knesset.