A remark by Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy that the court’s decisions are not subject to rabbinical approval went straight to the heart of the matter, with irate haredi demonstrators declaring that if they had to choose between the court and their rabbis, the rabbis always would come first.

Just when we thought Orthodoxy/ultra-Orthodoxy (there is now very little daylight between them) in Israel couldn’t sink any lower, it manages to plumb the depths and occupy new moral and spiritual low ground.

Previous generations of Jews of all persuasions could manage to put 100,000 Jews onto the streets for the sake of civil rights and desegregation in the US, or for the sake of peace in the Middle East.

This generation, increasingly dominated by an Orthodoxy that appears to more of a set of a-moral rituals than a major religious stream, seems to determined to outdo previous generations in the number of Jews it can galvanize into a demonstration or a riot. To what end, one may ask? For the sake of such worthy values as desegregation or peace? Not quite. Orthodox Judaism demonstrates and protests in favour of segregation. Not between Jews and non-Jews, or between Jewish men and women, as with previous protests, but between Jewish children and other Jewish children; between so-called Ashkenazi and Sephardi children. Between those of supposedly European descent and those of mainly Middle-Eastern descent.

(In the absence of dissenting voices, I assume that these demonstrators speak in the name of Orthodox Judaism as a whole.)

Zionism’s founding generations are turning in their graves at this unspeakable picture; at the sight of a massive protest IN FAVOUR of discrimination along racial lines similar to that which led to the destruction of European Jewry, this while survivors of that Holocaust are still among us.

Assuming that unequal abilities at school could simply be accounted for by race (oh wait, not “race”; “culture”), why doesn’t the doctrine of “kol Yisrael arevim zeh ba-zeh” (all Jews are responsible for one another) apply here? Why are these paragons of Jewish values not clamouring to help bring their Sephardi brethren “up to their level”, instead of trying to keep them in their place?

Only one question remains: in practice, how do they distinguish between Ashkenazi and Sephardi children, between white and non-white? Do they use the SS model and demand proof of Ashkenazi ancestry back to 1750 (or 1948?). Or do they use the looser South African Apartheid model and take the decision based on the appearance of the child?

I am somewhat saddened (although not particularly surprised) by what has become of Orthodox Judaism. I am even more saddened by what it is doing to Judaism and the Jewish People as a whole, and what is doing to our greatest common treasure, the State of Israel. It is now becoming clear how Israel will end in this century; not with the bang of Iran’s missiles, but with the whimper of the excrement-filled diapers hurled by the ultra-Orthodox, a fitting metaphor for what they bring to Israel.