Shas chairman Aryeh Deri is considering resigning from the Knesset while continuing to lead the party as chairman from outside parliament.
Deri has rarely left his home in Jerusalem’s Bayit Vegan neighborhood since the vote and has not yet commented publicly on the results. He has been meeting there with members of the party’s spiritual leadership, the Council of Torah Sages, and a small circle of confidants.
In those conversations, Deri raised the idea of stepping down as an MK while remaining party chairman. Part of the reasoning is that this would let the shrunken faction staff Knesset committees more effectively.
No final decision has been made, but party insiders believe he is leaning toward resigning.
“Collaborators in Haredi garb”
The deliberations follow an editorial in Shas’s official newspaper that acknowledged the painful result but blamed much of it on what it called a “well-oiled incitement machine,” including elements within the Haredi community itself.
“We must tell the truth: the emerging results are not what we hoped and prayed for,” the editorial opened. It promised that the data would be studied in depth and that practical conclusions would be drawn, and said that with God’s help and wise work the defeat would become “a launching point” for rebuilding the party, stronger than before.
At the same time, the paper said the party had faced an unprecedented campaign against it. “There has never been such a toxic election campaign. We did not face a poison machine, but poison monsters, plural.” It added that the effort had not begun with the election but had been building for years.
The editorial alleged that the campaign was bankrolled by “huge sums” from the party’s “worst enemies, spiritual and material,” with help from “collaborators in Haredi garb” who worked to undermine the authority of the Council of Torah Sages.
“Every leper and every outcast”
The paper also complained that Shas’s leaders had refused to get drawn into public mudslinging, and argued that this restraint had been used against them.
“Every leper and every outcast made it a hobby to bash, to attack, to mock and to slander at every opportunity,” the editorial said, accusing critics of exploiting the leadership’s responsibility “not to break the vessels.” It concluded that no party had ever faced “such a well-oiled and wicked incitement campaign.”
Despite the blow, the editorial closed on a note of defiance, invoking the verse from Proverbs: “Seven times the righteous man falls and rises.”
