Utterly without shame, bribery convict and tax offender Aryeh Deri has responded to the High Court’s unsurprising determination that his return to ministerial office is “unreasonable in the extreme” by depicting the ruling as a dishonestly motivated assault on the “great revolution” his Shas party has been fostering.

Hours after Wednesday’s ruling that he must immediately step down or be fired, and having hosted Benjamin Netanyahu for a solidarity and strategy session that also constituted a joint sneering message of defiance to the justices the prime minister is hellbent on neutering, Deri declared: “We’ll continue the great revolution.

In combination, these priorities — presented by Deri and UTJ leader Yitzhak Goldknopf as significant achievements — mean more of their constituents are to be denied the basic education they need to become an effective and fulfilled part of the workforce who are able to provide for their families, and constitute a disincentive for them to even try to do so.

Only last month, in some of the most spectacularly un-self-aware comments it is possible to conceive, Netanyahu accurately explained in an English-language interview how, as finance minister 20 years ago, he introduced sweeping reforms to the national welfare system, which he said had been widely abused in much of the Arab and Haredi communities.

Not only is it deeply damaging for much of the Haredi community to be consigned to inferior education, exclusion from national service, reduced prospects of productive employment and a disincentive to try to work, but it is also immensely harmful to the rest of Israel.

In fact, to the terrible detriment of Deri’s own voters and the wider state, the Shas leader’s “great revolution” will go on — whether or not he can find a window to come through, or a ceiling to smash, in order to outflank the court and ministerially direct it.