There is no use crying over spilt milk, as the saying goes. But over this milk I am crying. More than that, I am hopping mad.

2.4 million liters of milk were spilt this week on the order of the rabbinate in the Tel-Aviv area. I did not understand what exactly was their sin, something to do with foreign workers, Sabbath and Passover. Perhaps "Tnuvah", the marketing organization, understands it. "Tnuva", once the pride of the Kibbutzim, centerpiece of secular socialist Zionism, is now shaking when the ultra-orthodox rabbis are sneezing.

There is something to cry about. Ten million glasses of milk! On TV we see every day Ethiopian children starving to death. On our own doorstep, we are told, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children are suffering from malnutrition. Yet the rabbis spill milk.

They believe that they can do whatever they want. That we shall not cry over the spilt milk. And not over the hundreds of million dollars spilt from the state's coffers into their pockets. Millions taken by force out of the pockets of hard-working tax-payers, many of whom can't make ends meet. Suckers.

I feel the need for some explanation here. I did publicly advocate the inclusion of the orthodox Shas party in the government. After the elections, when the composition of the new Knesset became clear, I proposed in this column to invite Shas into the government coalition nearly at any price. I knew that without Shas it would be impossible to achieve peace - not with the Palestinians, neither with the Syrians. I believed that Ehud Barak really wants peace, and hoped that he has got what it takes to do the job. On the morrow of his victory I told him in the Knesset: "Take Shas!"

My intentions were quite simple. In coarse language: It is worthwhile to pay the orthodox a huge bribe for their support of peace. Peace is much more urgent, much more important, than the orthodox scandals. Now I perceive that the power-drunk orthodox leadership is making mistakes that will eventually bring about its downfall.

Because a year has passed, the bribe has been paid tenfold, and peace is further away than before. The responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of Barak. But Barak is, at least partly, influenced by the orthodox betrayal. They twisted his arm every second day and hinted that they would break it: at the moment of truth they would vote against peace. Barak is not such a hero that he would risk his political future on peace with Assad and/or Arafat, knowing that rabbi Ovadia Josef is waiting behind the corner, ready to jump him on the way to the referendum. Barak is no gambler.

But the orthodox are. Typical gamblers. Sitting at the roulette table, gaining again and again small stakes, only to lose everything in one big throw. Probably this will happen to them over the subject of military service of the Yeshivah-students.

The appointment of the Tal commission to deal with this subject was a big bribe to the orthodox. No commission of inquiry is ever objective - he who decides on the composition of the commission decides in advance what the outcome will be. In this case, there was not even a pretense of objectivity. The recommendations were known well in advance: Not a reduction in the number of the Yeshiva-boys to be exempted from the draft, but its enlargement, not the liquidation of the scandal (as Barak had promised before the elections) but its institutionalization. Within a short time, every fifth young man will wear a kippah instead of an army beret. In other words, a fifth of the service of every soldier will be done instead of an orthodox shirker.

Perhaps this would be tolerable in a time of peace, when the army will be smaller, if the public would be convinced that peace was achieved with the help of the orthodox. But now every soldier will know that peace was torpedoed by the orthodox, that because of them there is again a danger of war with Syria and new bloodshed on the Lebanese border (because of the lack of an agreement with the Syrians) and a renewal of the bloody struggle with the Palestinians. Youngsters who will be called upon to put their life in danger's way will think about the orthodox. Those orthodox that do not serve, that are not in danger, but laugh at the seculat suckers.

Only a fool can believe that this will pass without opposition. Sooner or later there will be rebellions of draftees. A movement of secular objectors will spread in the high schools. We do not raise suckers in this country.

The spilling of the milk is a symbol. A symbol of orthodox arrogance, of orthodox disdain for humanist values. It would be worthwhile for orthodox rabbis to think hard. So that they will not have, some day, to cry over spilt milk.