A State For The Jews

A state for the Jews, or a Jewish state? This dilemma, which has been at the heart of Israel's identity for at least the last 40 years, is coming to a head. Reframed, the question is really about whether Israel is to be a democracy or a theocracy. It has been moving toward theocracy for political reasons at least since the mid-1980s, as the secular right-wing Likud Party saw that the only way it could maintain its stranglehold on power was to consolidate an alliance with the religious parties. Today, Israel is a divided nation, as divided as it has ever been in its 75 year history. And now, the war with Hamas has brought those divisions to the fore with a new move to eliminate the exemption of Haredi military service. Some points to keep in mind... 

Point 1: Israel was never meant to be the guardian of Orthodox Judaism. Quite the opposite. There were 37 signatories to Israel's Declaration of Independence, and only three were rabbis. The signatories were chosen to represent a broad cross-section of the yishuv (the pre-Independence settlement Jewish society). There is no overt mention of God in the document (unlike the US Declaration of Independence which mentions God in the first paragraph). There was some debate surrounding whether or not to include it. Most of the signatories were strongly against any reference to God, but they finally settled on including the euphemistic term 'Rock of Israel' near the end of the document. They rationalized that secular Jews would understand that phrase in the literal sense as the Land of Israel. The Zionist movement(s) that inspired the creation and building of the modern State was decidedly secular, beginning with Herzl who envisioned a country where Jewish culture could flourish together with European heritage within a society that balances the best of Capitalism tempered by elements of Socialism. Religion did not factor, except in the sense that freedom of religion had to be a basic right. Herzl wrote, "Matters of faith were once and for all excluded from public influence...Whether anyone sought religious devotion in the synagogue, in the church, in the mosque, in the art museum, or in a philharmonic concert, did not concern society. That was his [own] private affair."

Point 2: In 1948 the exemption from military service for the ultra-Orthodox was justified by the need to restore the Torah world that was destroyed in the Holocaust. At the time it made sense on a couple of levels. The Haredim of this era were a relatively small minority of the country. In subsequent decades, the explosion of the birth rate in the religious community combined with their aliyah (immigration to Israel), and the comparative collapse of secular births together with their emigration from Israel, means that one in four young Israelis will be ultra-Orthodox by the end of this decade.

Point 3: Military service in Israel is a central factor of cohesion in Israeli society, reflecting a sense of civic responsibility and creating networks of lifelong interpersonal bonds. It's commonly seen as the great social equalizer, of the rich and the poor, of cultural groups and traditions, of the Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Yemeni. The Haredi exemption did the opposite. It split society in two, creating a division of two main specialized classes of citizens, as it were, distorting the social contract of Israeli society. The exemption from military service for the ultra-Orthodox generated a two-tier society in which haredim were seen as 'privileged', and secular citizens who served in the military increasingly grew to resent them for it. There is the sense that society's burdens are not equally shared, with secular Israelis paying the heavier price. As it was put in a recent article,"...the time has come to strip the Israeli flak jacket from the haredim..."

Point 4: As Israel has become more religious and politically dominated by religious movements - who themselves have become more extreme as exemplified by the push to expand settlement of biblical Judea and Samaria - it has become more alienated from the secular Jewish diaspora. In recent decades Israel has trumpeted its economic independence and strength, at the same time as it has become increasingly isolated within the international community, and direct involvement of the United States in the Middle East has receded. The traditional alliance between Israel and the United States is fraying, and we can expect it will continue to fray as long as successive Israeli (right-wing/religious) governments define themselves in terms that are antagonistic to the west. Some don't think it matters, or that it's temporary. I don't believe it's temporary, nor do I believe tiny Israel can afford to lose the support of the secular Jewish diaspora.

Israel continues shifting away from an open secular democracy toward a socially fragmented, institutionally atrophied, theocracy at its peril. It's splitting the country apart. The so-called Judicial reform proposed last summer was part of it. Israel is at a crossroads. Hopefully, the post-war period will result in a political and cultural reckoning that will re-calibrate the country's navigation system toward the secular democracy and home to all Jews that it was always meant to be.