the one thing good about Yachad is the attempt at "unity" of some sort. I am not a big fan of using the word "achdut" every time two people slightly different do something together, but I will accept it in this case, because it is a much broader project, even if it is partly pragmatic and technical in nature - meaning they took in Marzel and Otzma because they need to ensure that they would pass the threshold, not because of some attempt at unifying more streams of Orthodox Judaism, but ok, I'll give it to them. They still did it while nobody else did.

Beyond that, I am not impressed. I haven't heard any serious discussion of issues they plan to work on and make theirs.

So, I like the way they are putting people from different streams together to work and function together, forcing them to get beyond their normal biases and prejudices.

One would think that even if nothing else, at least that is one good thing.

That's what I would, and do, think.

Yet that is exactly what the "mainstream" Haredi parties and askanim are attacking Yachad on.

Shasniks have been saying all week that this is against what Rav Ovadia believed. He did not trust the kippot srugot. I even heard one prove it by saying on the radio that in all his halacha books that he wrote, Rav Ovadia quotes a plethora of rabbonim, but never ever does he quote a Dati Leumi rav. They are calling the unity of Yachad a form of shaatnez.

This morning I heard Rav Mottka Bloi, an askan for UTJ and an educator, say horrible things about how bad Yachad is, precisely because of the unity. Creating this unity will ruin kids, who will know longer go just to haredi schools, but will go to Ulpana, medrasha, and others, instead of Beis Yaakov, as they are all good. Granted, he was not speaking as a representative of UTJ at the time and only in his own name, but as an influential askan, Bloi speaks, if he doesn't set, the party line.

Somewhere along the way, there is a big discrepancy on the issue of unity. If unity, achdut, only valid when it is between two people wearing black hats in Ponevezshe? Only between Belzers and Viznitzers? Is it also between Haredim and Dati Leumi people, or is that just a deal with the devil?

In a famous quote attributed to Moshe Dayan, Bill Clinton, Yitzchak Rabin, and Nelson Mandela (and probably more, you don't make peace with your friends, but with your enemies. Wouldn't the same be true here? You don't have unity with people like you, but with people not like you.