NY Times - It started as a bit of sarcastic whimsy: Israelis frustrated with the lack of public buses on the Jewish Sabbath and holidays hijacked the Facebook page of the transportation minister during Passover and turned it into a shared-ride board.
Nadav Maor wanted a lift to the country’s northern tip, with “room in the trunk” for some equipment. Miki Ezra Stranger needed to get to Friday night dinner at her grandmother’s house in Kiryat Motzkin from Ramat Gan, a journey of about 70 miles. Hamutal Adler, a single mother of two, was more flexible: “Just want a bit of beach,” she wrote.
None connected with a ride, but they did manage to catapult the issue to the forefront of political conversation, reviving a thorny debate about the role of religion in the Jewish state.
The minister, Yisrael Katz, derisively dismissed the ride-seekers as leftist sore losers after conservatives’ success in elections last month. Then it got more personal: Protesters surrounded Mr. Katz’s house, and a leftist Parliament member introduced legislation to ban him from using his state-issued Chrysler minivan when the buses are not running. Photo A bus station in Tel Aviv, which once banned horse-drawn carriages on Saturdays. Credit Oded Balilty/Associated Press
“Public transportation is a necessity: I think it should be like electricity or water or gas,” said Omry Hazut, 27, who started the Facebook protest. “State and religion, this bond, is broken a lot of times, but only if you can afford it. If you can afford a car, you can pull the switch and start it on Saturday, but if you can’t, you won’t have any option of leaving your house.”
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tries to stitch together a new governing coalition that is expected to be made up of rightist and religious parties, a continuing struggle over Israeli identity is in the balance. The debate over transportation is part of a larger one over a so-called nationality bill that seeks to redefine the relationship between Israeli democracy and Jewish character, which was among the divisive issues that helped collapse Mr. Netanyahu’s previous coalition last fall.
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