Yes… Israelis should certainly be asking that question.
UD‘s inclined to believe that the answer has less to do with political expediency (the ultras are an enormous voting bloc; Israel has proportional representation) than with raw visceral stuff like fear and hatred. Quite a few ultras have always been violent; as their numbers hugely grow, their threat as a violent mass grows. Primal fear (compounded by fear of infection from large numbers of ultras who – as at the stampede site – routinely gather in massive spreader events) is felt in every part of the government.
Hatred is there too – not just because a corrupt, obstructionist minority controls a great deal of common daily life in Israel, and not just because routine ultra violence damages and destroys property and people, but because the very spiritual and political foundation of ultraorthodoxy deploys itself radically against the very foundation of Israel as a democratic state. Ultras hate the Zionist state and are notorious for doing gratuitously vile things – ignoring the moment of silence on Holocaust Remembrance day, for instance – to parade their contempt. They wouldn’t think of sullying themselves by fighting in the loathed state’s defense. They physically attacked female soldiers who arrived at the stampede to try to save lives.
You can’t exactly load this much shit up against the secular Israeli majority without generating real hatred. As in: You hate me; I hate you.
The stampede was a stew-in-their-own-juices event. The Israeli government is perfectly capable of controlling public events; in the case of the ultraorthodox — who insisted on doing something suicidally stupid, in response to which any responsible government would intervene — the government basically said fuck it because at this point they don’t care. Let the idiots do their thing. Fuck ’em.
And what of the ultras themselves? Isn’t the real question In what other annual mass festival does our group’s leadership allow an audience of hundreds of thousands – including many children – to gather in a place that is ill-prepared to safely house mere hundreds? And here the answer ain’t pretty either. Our leaders, writes the ultraorthodox author of the opinion piece I’ve been quoting, “prefer to leave us poor and ignorant.” She forgot hungry. And unvaccinated. And unemployable. You’d think that would be enough ill-treatment for people to start leaving the sect, and a few do, but not that many. And now the sect’s men at the top have treated the ultras’ little children (they were a third of the deaths) to death by suffocation, far from their mothers (no women allowed; strict gender separation, which the ultras try to enforce on the secular too, is another fun contribution they make to life in Israel), and toppled over in the dark at one AM and then lights out forever. Quite an end the rabbis rigged up for their most vulnerable.
All of this is one reason some observers call ultraorthodoxy a death cult. Why anyone beyond the mentally fragile and the mentally ill would agree to play along is probably an unanswerable question.