Much attention has focused recently on when Ehud Olmert will vacate his position and who will inherit it. But there is another job, no less important, which is already vacant, yet for which there seem to be no contenders at all: the job of a functioning religious Zionist movement. Granted, the position is still nominally occupied. But in its response to last month’s conversion scandal, the current religious Zionist movement effectively declared bankruptcy.

The scandal began when the Rabbinical Court of Appeals retroactively annulled every conversion ever performed by a special court headed by Rabbi Haim Druckman – thousands of conversions in all. To add insult to injury, the verdict was also larded with personal attacks on Druckman, a leading religious Zionist rabbi.

Then the Prime Minister’s Office’s joined in, dismissing the 75-year-old Druckman as head of the government’s Conversion Authority. Olmert’s excuse – that he was obeying a Civil Service Commission dictate to dismiss a man long past retirement age, not appeasing the ultra-Orthodox parties that dominate the official rabbinate – was transparent nonsense:

Had he truly cared about proper governance rather than appeasing the ultra-Orthodox, he could have asked the commission for an extension so as not to leave the post vacant while he sought a replacement; the commission would surely have acceded. Nor has he rushed to find a replacement since: It took him weeks just to form a search committee.

THE RELIGIOUS Zionist establishment thus had multiple incentives to respond vigorously. First, of course, was the human tragedy: thousands of converts and their children suddenly cast into religious limbo. Second were the national consequences: Assimilating some 300,000 non-Jewish immigrants is a vital national interest; yet why would these immigrants undergo an arduous conversion process if their conversions can be undone at any rabbi’s whim, even decades later? Third was the hillul hashem (literally, desecration of God’s name): The judges claimed that divinely ordained law had mandated their sweeping (and halakhically dubious) rejection of thousands of converts of whose individual circumstances they knew nothing; a suitable religious response was thus necessary to rescue God’s honor. And finally, if all that were insufficient, there was the blatant personal insult to Druckman – and, by extension, to the entire religious Zionist establishment.

Yet the religious Zionist silence was deafening. Few prominent Zionist rabbis even raised an outcry. The movement’s religious leadership did not convene to formulate a Zionist alternative to the increasingly non-Zionist official rabbinate; only one prominent rabbi, Benny Lau, even publicly urged such a step. Nor did its nine-member Knesset faction hold urgent discussions on reforming the rabbinate via legislation.

But the last straw was a June 5 petition to the High Court of Justice against the verdict. The main petitioner was a woman whose conversion had been overturned, but she was joined by several leading religious Zionist organizations, such as Emunah and Ne’emanei Torah v’Avoda. And the religious Zionist establishment applauded: Amnon Shapira, former secretary-general of the Bnei Akiva youth movement, for instance, termed the petition “the first time the religious Zionist public has told the ultra-Orthodox outright that they have gone far enough.”

NO CLEARER declaration of bankruptcy is imaginable: The religious Zionist establishment publicly announced that it has no religious solution for such quintessentially religious Zionist problems as the role of conversion in assimilating non-Jewish immigrants or the official rabbinate’s role in the state; instead, it is begging a nonreligious court to solve these problems for it.

Religious Zionism has been fading into irrelevancy for so long that one might wonder why it even matters. Yet in fact, a flourishing religious Zionism is crucial to the Jewish state’s survival.

A Jewish state need not be religious, but it must have some Jewish content. Otherwise, it would be just another Western democracy, distinguishable from the rest only by greater military threats and a lower standard of living. Such a state would clearly have trouble either retaining existing citizens or attracting new ones.

However, Jewish content can only come from Judaism, the religion that preserved the Jews as a people for millennia. Thus, should Israelis become convinced that Judaism is incompatible with the needs of a modern state – that Israel can survive only by severing all ties with Judaism – that would sound the Jewish state’s death knell.

Unfortunately, some current Jewish practice is incompatible with the needs of a modern state – not because Judaism and statehood are inherently incompatible, but because for 2,000 years of exile, halakhic development necessarily focused on enabling the Jewish people to survive that exile. And the requirements of survival in exile, where issues such as defense, economics and immigration are simply irrelevant, differ vastly from those of survival in one’s own state. Thus, just as 2,000 years ago Jewish law had to make the wrenching change from a code designed for sovereignty to a code designed for exile, it must now make the same wrenching change in reverse. And only those committed to halakha and statehood alike can realistically effect this change.

Ironically, a new poll shows that secular Israelis instinctively understand this need. The poll, commissioned by the Absorption Ministry, found that 60 percent of secular Israelis worry that the influx of non-Jewish immigrants will lead to assimilation. Astonishingly, however, 74 percent said the best solution to this problem is for the immigrants to undergo Orthodox conversion. Granted, they attached a rider no Orthodox rabbi could accept: that such conversions be divorced from acceptance of Jewish law. But the very fact that they chose Orthodox conversion as their preferred solution shows an instinctive realization that the state’s problems must be resolved within the framework of Jewish tradition if it is to remain Jewish.

This task is enormously difficult, but it should not be impossible: After all, Jewish law was created for life in a sovereign state. Nevertheless, this is the greatest challenge Judaism has faced in 2,000 years. And meeting it will require the brightest, most creative and boldest religious Zionism possible – not a cowardly so-called religious Zionism that offers nothing but a choice between abdication to the ultra-Orthodox and abdication to the secular courts.

I hope Bashar Assad had the courtesy to send Ehud Olmert holiday greetings for Shavuot this week. After all, Shavuot is a harvest festival, and it is largely thanks to Olmert that Assad is now reaping success on every front.

His first major victory was, of course, his reestablishment of de facto control over Lebanon, just three years after losing it to the Cedar Revolution. Under Lebanese law, major governmental decisions require a two-thirds majority, so last month’s agreement awarding Hizbullah one-third of Lebanon’s cabinet seats gives the organization, and hence its Syrian patron, veto power over government decisions. This victory stemmed directly from the Second Lebanon War in 2006: The IDF’s failure to defeat a much smaller and more poorly equipped terrorist organization greatly boosted Hizbullah’s prestige, and consequently its political power, while the loophole-ridden cease-fire that ended the war enabled Hizbullah to rearm so thoroughly that it could successfully mount the military putsch that produced May’s agreement.

This achievement, however, was swiftly followed by another no less significant: Syria’s sudden emergence from the economic isolation that has been strangling its economy. This not only bolsters Assad’s rule, but also deprives the West of its main lever over Damascus.

Syria has recently reported a surge in investment and trade from the Gulf states, and European diplomats report that these states intend to boost their investments still further in an effort to woo Damascus from its alliance with Teheran. As evidence of these growing ties, Assad visited Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates last week, just days after hosting Qatar’s emir in Damascus.

Moreover, Syria’s relations with Europe are also thawing, meaning aid and trade might soon flow from that direction as well. Last month, for instance, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos paid his first visit to Damascus in a year. A few days later, French President Nicolas Sarkozy telephoned Assad, after months in which Paris had frozen high-level contacts with Damascus due to Syria’s interference in Lebanon. Significantly, this occurred just a week after Hizbullah’s putsch secured it veto power – which should have increased French outrage at Hizbullah’s patron rather than prompting reconciliation.

Clearly, these developments bode well for Syria’s economy. But equally important is what they portend for efforts to modify Syria’s behavior. After all, the West had long promised to reward Syria with trade and investment if it stopped interfering in Lebanon and supporting terror. But now, not only is Syria securing these benefits without modifying its behavior, it is doing so precisely because of its refusal to modify its behavior: Assad’s alliance with the region’s biggest rogue state, Iran, is precisely what persuaded the Gulf States to offer their gifts unconditionally, in an effort to compete with Teheran. And Europe now seems poised to follow suit.

One might wonder what Olmert had to do with all this. The answer is twofold.

HIS FIRST contribution is reflected in a claim made to Haaretz by a Moratinos aide: that the Gulf states are linking their investment to progress in the recently announced Israeli-Syrian talks. That seems far-fetched, since Gulf officials themselves cite Iran as the impetus for their aid-and-trade initiative. Nevertheless, the Israeli-Syrian talks provided a useful fig leaf: They enabled the Gulf states to pretend that they are rewarding good behavior – efforts to resolve a major regional conflict – rather than appeasing bad behavior.

This fig leaf is also what enabled Europe’s rapprochement with Syria: Sarkozy, for instance, officially called Assad to express support for the talks with Israel. It seems clear that Europe wanted to mend its relationship with Syria anyway: Otherwise, it would not be rushing ahead so fast that, according to media reports, the Foreign Ministry has been reduced to begging European states to slow down until Assad proves he is serious about peace. But Olmert’s initiative provided the necessary excuse.

Olmert’s second contribution, however, was even more significant: His bungling produced a string of Iranian victories around the region, and it was these victories that turned Iran into such a regional threat that Syria, its junior partner, is now being courted in the hope of reducing Teheran’s power by splitting the alliance.

First and foremost, of course, was his performance during the Second Lebanon War, since Hizbullah’s victory was naturally perceived as a victory for its chief financiers, arms suppliers and trainers: Syria and Iran.

The same goes for Olmert’s performance in the south, where an even smaller and more poorly equipped terrorist organization has rained rockets on Israel with impunity for years. Just as with Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas’s “victory” stems entirely from Olmert’s decision to confine the IDF to aerial strikes and small-scale maneuvers rather than ordering a major ground operation of the type that virtually eradicated terror from the West Bank in recent years. But the Arab world’s perception is that a small terrorist group has intimidated the mighty IDF. And that redounds to the credit of Hamas’s chief backer, Iran.

FINALLY, OLMERT has facilitated Iran’s unimpeded drive to acquire nuclear weapons, which has also greatly bolstered its prestige. Clearly, the chief culprits here are those countries, like Russia, that have fecklessly prevented truly painful sanctions on Iran. Yet Olmert has encouraged this fecklessness by praising rather than decrying it. While in Moscow last fall, for instance, he publicly praised Russia’s stance on Iran – whereupon Russia promptly resumed nuclear fuel shipments to Iran’s Bushehr reactor and gutted yet another round of sanctions on Teheran. After all, Israel is the country Iran’s president keeps threatening to destroy. So if even Israel publicly deems the current pathetic efforts sufficient, who are other countries to disagree?

Olmert has thus made major contributions to all of Assad’s recent successes: His bungled Lebanon war helped Syria reassert control over Lebanon; his peace initiative provided both Europe and the Gulf states with a fig leaf for ending Syria’s economic isolation; and his multiple failures in dealing with Iran greatly bolstered the clout of its Syrian protégé. Altogether, it is an impressive record of prime ministerial achievement. It is just too bad the beneficiary was an enemy country rather than his own.

The Gil Pensioners Party’s sordid split, finally concluded this week, has already been sidelined in the public consciousness by Ehud Olmert’s cash-stuffed envelopes. But such forgetfulness is a mistake – because this incident provided compelling evidence, if more were needed, of why Israel’s electoral system needs revamping.

A brief recap: Three of Gil’s seven MKs sought to split off and form an independent faction – which by law, one-third or more of a faction may do, provided the Knesset House Committee approves. However, the breakaway MKs then signed a deal with businessman Arkadi Gaydamak under which he promised to match their government funding (thereby doubling their budget), pay salaries to 22 party employees, and give all three MKs safe slots on the list he plans to field next election.

Most of the Knesset opposed this deal, saying it amounted to letting a wealthy businessman openly buy three MKs. The breakaways therefore removed the contract’s financial clauses and insisted that no oral promises had replaced them. But a majority of the House Committee disbelieved them, and consequently vetoed the split until the deal with Gaydamak was scrapped entirely. Seemingly, the Knesset’s self-policing mechanism had worked.

IN REALITY, however, the breakaways’ initial bid failed only because it was a bit too blatant. Had they concluded a quiet handshake deal with Gaydamak rather than a written contract, they would probably have encountered scant opposition. After all, they would hardly have been the first MKs to cross party lines for personal gain, either political or financial.

In 1995, for instance, Gonen Segev and Alex Goldfarb, who won election on the far-right Tsomet list, broke away and provided the last two votes needed to pass the Oslo-2 Accord. In exchange for betraying their voters, they received a ministry and deputy ministry, respectively, thereby gaining both politically and financially: Higher salaries and pensions, plus perks such as free mail and telephone for the rest of their lives, add up to benefits worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of shekels over a normal lifetime. Yet the Knesset not only approved this deal; it retroactively amended a law banning such quid pro quos in order to do so.

The Knesset also approved Likud’s split over the disengagement, even though the breakaways were defying a clear mandate from Likud members (disengagement lost an internal Likud referendum by a 60-40 margin) and gaining political benefits thereby: Since then premier Ariel Sharon led the new Kadima faction, the breakaways would receive all the plum governmental jobs.

Clearly, MKs neither can nor should be barred from changing their minds. A good MK owes his voters his best judgment, and sometimes, that does mean changing his views, whether due to changed circumstances or a changed understanding of existing circumstances. Yet neither is an MK an autonomous agent: As an elected representative, he is supposed to represent his voters.

MOST DEMOCRACIES resolve this contradiction by requiring every parliamentarian to seek reelection from the same voters who elected him originally. If they reelect him despite a policy change, it will be retroactively clear that they approved this change. If not, his betrayal will cost him his seat – a price that would make most MKs think long and hard before executing a policy u-turn.

But in Israel, because MKs are elected by party lists rather than individually, no such balancing mechanism exists: An MK who betrays his original voters can simply switch parties and get reelected by different voters. Thus he pays no price for his betrayal, and his original voters can do nothing but swallow their bile and hope for better luck with their next vote.

Had the Gil breakaways’ original deal been approved, for instance, they would probably have won reelection, since most polls show Gaydamak’s planned list making it into the Knesset. But they might well have been reelected by different voters: Those who supported Gil last election are not necessarily those who back Gaydamak today.

Similarly, while some Kadima breakaways were reelected by the same voters, since many Likud voters switched to Kadima, others were reelected by people who had previously voted for different parties.

This situation is devastating for democracy in two ways. First, of course, it encourages MKs to betray their voters for personal gain, since they need not fear losing their seats in consequence. The Gil breakaways were a particularly egregious example, but in practice, they merely did openly what many MKs before them did only slightly more subtly.

Even worse, however, is the impact on voters’ faith in the system. It is no accident that this growing phenomenon of MKs switching parties for personal gain has been accompanied by a steep decline in voter turnout rates, from roughly 80 percent in every election through 1999 to 69 percent in 2003 and 64 percent in 2006. If people feel that their vote is meaningless – that once elected, an MK can do whatever he pleases, and voters can neither stop him nor even punish him – then there is little incentive to vote.

BUT A citizen who refrains from voting because he considers his vote meaningless is someone with no stake in the system. He has no reason to try to affect policy through political activity, since he does not believe political activity can affect policy. And he has no incentive to refrain from resorting instead to violence, since he does not believe he is thereby defying the majority’s will, as reflected through its MKs; he is merely defying the will of 120 cynics whose positions du jour are influenced more by momentary personal interests than by their voters’ views.

A democracy can survive a few such disaffected citizens, but it cannot survive too many of them. And anyone who talks with ordinary Israelis will quickly realize that our falling voter turnout indeed reflects a growing number of citizens who consider voting pointless.

This problem has only one remedy: revamping our electoral system so that MKs are directly elected, and must seek reelection from the same constituency. Otherwise, Israelis’ disaffection with democracy will continue to grow – thereby endangering the country’s survival as a democratic state.