On their own terms, the recent riots in Jerusalem make no sense.
Doctors discover that a woman from a small, anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox sect, probably suffering from Münchausen by proxy syndrome, has been starving her 3-year-old, who has dwindled down to an emaciated 15 pounds. Social workers scoop up the kid and place him in intensive care at Hadassah hospital, and police scoop up the mother and put her in jail.
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And then all hell breaks loose. A rabbi of the sect declares the event a blood libel, comparing the police to Cossacks. Immediately, young men in black robes and fur hats take to the streets, setting bus stops and dumpsters ablaze, pelting police with stones, and decrying the doctors of Hadassah as latter-day Josef Mengeles. Someone sets aflame the government welfare and social services building in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Me’ah Shearim; others enter the building, smashing computer screens as they go. In the first three days after the toddler is taken for treatment, dozens more are sent to the hospital with wounds from stones and broken glass, and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of city property are burned or smashed.
In response, the new, secular mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, announces that he will suspend all social services to ultra-orthodox neighborhoods that, being among the poorest in the city, rely on them as a bulwark against Third World kinds of hunger and homelessness. The secular press -- Ha’aretz, Yediot Ahronoth, and Ma’ariv -- prints op-eds portraying the ultra-orthodox as child-abusing hooligans. Yediot devotes pages to the story, adding as a sidebar an item about a delegation of ultra-orthodox Jews from the United States visiting Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, offering him moral and political support in his fight against the Zionists.
None of this adds up. Tragedies of mental illness and child abuse are everywhere, and it’s not surprising -- not to social workers and not to rabbis -- to find a case of it among the ultra-Orthodox. There’s no reason to expect it to become a referendum on religious-secular relations in Israel’s capital. Nor, really, is there any reason to expect that ultra-Orthodox street violence would be met by collective punishment, answering thugs by threatening entire neighborhoods with penury. Nor is there any reason to link the riots to the widespread secular suspicion that underneath all the ultra-Orthodox wool and fur are traitors, that the black clothes cover but fail to hide jet-black hearts.
For these events to make any sense, one must put them into broader context. Tensions between ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews in Jerusalem have been mounting for months. November’s municipal election replaced the affable ultra-Orthodox mayor, Uri Lupolianski, with Barkat, a combative, secular high-tech millionaire. In the spring, Barkat ordered that a municipal parking lot not far from the Old City be opened for business on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, inflaming some ultra-Orthodox leaders who saw it as a violation of the “status quo,” or long-standing modus vivendi concerning religious observance in the city. Protests, sometimes more peaceful, sometimes less, have materialized each Saturday since, as the new mayor-tried to negotiate a compromise involving opening a different lot, farther from the likely path of any ultra-Orthodox Jews. Then in June, Jerusalem hosted its largest ever gay pride march, which further angered rabbis and their flocks. Seen against this backdrop, last week’s riots were about much more than one case of putative child abuse; the starved kid, it becomes clear, only turned a longer-simmering potion of frustration and anger into a boiling rage.
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