The secular white male hegemony, which the media still represent, may have grown accustomed to Yishai's existence because of his political power, but it has never accepted him as part of it or as its equal.
Eli Yishai complains that he is being "lynched" for being "Mizrahi" (of Middle Eastern descent ) and "Haredi" (ultra-Orthodox ). He is right, but he cannot wash his hands of his part in this.
Before all else, we must admit that this is the media's pattern - going hysterical and denying their role in the chain of events. Thus it is reasonable to believe that any minister would have been similarly ignored when he claimed, even if rightfully, that he fought for the firefighters and got them more money, and that the media had shown no interest in the issue before the disaster.
But having said that, we must admit that they are now getting back at Yishai big time.
The secular white (male) hegemony, which the media still represent, may have grown accustomed to Yishai's existence because of his political power, but it has never accepted him as part of it or as its equal. Now it is paying him back for the allowances he secured for yeshiva students and large families, his opposition to teaching the core curriculum in Haredi schools, his support for deporting foreign workers' children, the Haredi community's shirking of military service and the law that ends daylight savings time while it is still summer - all the things it sees as primitive and parochial, both as Haredi and as Mizrahi. But Yishai and his Shas party's spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, have played a major role in creating this depiction.
Shas built its power on its voters' Mizrahi identity, on the exclusion and discrimination they suffered. Shas promised them rectification. To this day, its platform is entitled "Shas - for social justice," and it lavishes many words on economic and social equality, the value of labor, the importance of education and even empowering women.
But the first article in Shas' platform is "to restore the former glory" of the Sephardi religious tradition. In other words, first and foremost, Shas is an ultra-Orthodox party, which like every other Judeocentric group over the course of 2,000 years of exile that failed to undergo modernization, is afraid of secularism and modernism and builds walls to protect itself from them.
This is how Shas enlisted masses of supporters and gave them ethnic and class pride while harnessing them to the ultra-Orthodox cause. It achieved sweeping success in its first goal - bringing the masses back to religious observance and vastly expanding the religious education system, from nursery schools to yeshivas.
But the condition for this success is seclusion and separatism, segregation from Israeli society, avoiding military service, shunning a general education and staying out of the labor market. In other words, increasing ignorance, poverty and social gaps.
Shas bolsters the very traits that caused the Mizrahi community to be discriminated against and excluded to begin with. It is worsening the community's plight and then exploiting it to increase its political strength.
But it also provides its voters with pride and team spirit. An essential instrument of every community's self-definition is a perpetual distinction between "us" and everyone who isn't us. Just as the secular white male hegemony defines itself by turning anyone who does not resemble it into the "other" - for instance, the "Haredi" and the "Mizrahi" - Shas keeps its community within the Jewish-Haredi ghetto by constantly reminding it that there is "us" and "them."
"Them" can be Arabs or foreigners, but most of the time they are secular Jews - the Israeli majority. Rabbi Ovadia knows very well that unlike the Ashkenazi Haredi community, "his" people were originally Israeli, and thus are prone to slip back into the Israeli way of life from which they came unless constantly reminded that they are different.
Yishai built himself on these distinctions, which define him as the rabbi's envoy and the deputy leader of this particular "us" - a very Haredi, very Mizrahi community. It is from adherence to these characteristics that he derives the validity of his draconian demands in the political arena.
Yishai is right: He is getting so much flak because he is a Haredi Mizrahi man in a ballgame of secular white men, who now feel they have a justified excuse for attacking him in that way. But he, for his part, is all too eager to play his part - that of the oppressed Haredi Mizrahi.
