Deri Ready to Give Facelift To Israeli Shas Party

About two years before Knesset member Aryeh Deri returned to the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, he already began speaking openly about starting a new party under his leadership. With his eyes aglitter, he told journalists, politicians and public figures who met with him in his tiny office in Jerusalem about his dream of using the knowledge and experience he accumulated to return to politics and become a unifying figure for the Israeli public.

By that time, Deri made his first moves to take over the leadership of Shas once again. Onlookers would have thought that he didn’t have a chance. Knesset member Eli Yishai’s position as party head and confidant to Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef was solid.

In 1999, Deri was found guilty of several crimes, including bribe-taking, and spent two years in prison, until July 2002. He has since told many people that he planned to return to politics — either with Shas or without it. He let them understand that he was intrigued by the idea of starting a new party, because Shas had become too separatist, too extreme and too associated with the ultra-Orthodox world, while abandoning its identity as a traditionalist social party. He was unhappy about those trends and believed that they harmed the party.

Deri spoke openly then about how he imagined a younger party with fewer professional politicians and a Knesset list that would be less ultra-Orthodox and more traditional. If he could, he would even include a woman, he said, though he qualified his statement by explaining that he would have a hard time getting that past the party’s ultra-Orthodox supporters. Deri spoke about a social and civil vision and his passionate desire to break away from the sectorial tendencies of the ultra-Orthodox. The secular people he spoke with were very impressed by his plans.