[Salon] Will Religious Extremists Bring Israel Down Again?

[Chas Freeman <cwfresidence@gmail.com>]

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-07-22/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/will-religious-extremists-bring-israel-down-again/00000189-7528-de6d-a1ef-f5eaeee00000

Will Religious Extremists Bring Israel Down Again? - Israel News - Haaretz.com

Anita Shapira,  Jul 22, 2023

The State of Israel has just celebrated the 75th anniversary of its existence. If someone had told us in 1948 that three-quarters of a century down the line, the country’s population would stand at close to 10 million, eight million of them Jews, that it would be one of the world’s leading countries in development of innovative technologies and would be considered a regional power, we would have thought they were daydreaming.

Israel is one of the most successful countries to arise in the post-World War II era of decolonization, this notwithstanding the endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the past half-year, however, the government of Israel and its leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, have been undoing achievements that were obtained with hard, persistent work by Israel’s governments over the years. They are destabilizing the economy, driving out foreign investors, causing the devaluation of the shekel and bringing about a loss of confidence in the country among the world’s financial institutions. And above all: They are generating a deep and unprecedented rift among the people of Israel.

There is something magical about the number 75. The two independent Jewish kingdoms that existed in the Land of Israel each lasted approximately that number of years. Both were conquered by great powers that dominated the region – Assyria and Babylon (in the eighth and sixth centuries, B.C.E.), and during the Second Temple period, Rome. Israel, and afterward Judah, did not accept foreign rule docilely; they rebelled and tried to regain their lost independence. Between a peace camp and a war camp, the war camp always triumphed.

“Because of our sins we were exiled from our land” – there is some truth to that saying, but it is not sins against God that brought the defeats and disasters. They were caused by struggles between moderates and extremists, in which the extremist, bellicose side always emerged victorious. An absence of political wisdom, an inability to maneuver between the great powers, a tendency to take the most extreme positions were what induced the great national calamities. The Jewish inclination to argue over trivialities, not to accept authority, to divide like an amoeba, upended Jewish statehood during both the First and Second Temple periods.

The Zionist movement was ambivalent about the ancient revolts. A national movement needs heroes to serve as symbols of both revolt and rejection of the depressing reality. Zionism, though, was a rationalist, pragmatist movement, which aimed to establish a Jewish national entity in the Land of Israel by means of activity that would utilize reality rather than working against it. Thus, on the one hand, a movement sprang up that rebelled against the Jewish condition and sought to establish an infrastructure for self-rule in the Land of Israel; but that on the other hand, sought cooperation with the ruling power, first the Turks and afterward the British. This tension reflected the dichotomy between the constant yearning for national glory, for Jewish independence, and the recognition by the majority of the national movement’s leaders of the need to act amid consideration for the limits of reality, to locate within it the cracks and fissures that would enable realization of the Zionist dream.

Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai, who left besieged Jerusalem in order to establish the yeshiva in Yavneh, was rejected by Zionist mythology as symbolizing the ethos of the weak – those who come to terms with reality and accept the authority of the strong. In contrast, Masada became the symbol of heroism and grit. But the heroism at Masada ended with collective suicide (in the year 73 C.E.) and the Bar Kochba revolt, about 50 years later, inflicted a more grievous calamity on the Jewish people than the destruction of the Temple. Not all the sages thought, as Rabbi Akiva did, that Shimon Bar Kochba was the Messiah. However, as usual, the extremists won the day.

The contradiction between admiration of defiance and readiness for self-sacrifice, and acceptance of realpolitik, has been a feature of the Zionist movement from its inception down to the present day. Zionism was established as a secular movement by people who had come into contact with general education and with the winds of nationalism that were blowing in 19th-century Europe. But the Zionist myth of returning to the land of the forefathers is inextricably bound up with the Jewish tradition, which is religious in character. The tension between Zionism as a movement anchored in the modern world, and Judaism, which constitutes the justification for the very existence of the liberation movement, is a source of duality that has been embedded in Zionism since its inception.

Jewish history is studded with manifestations of messianic movements, led by individuals who were in retrospect branded “false messiahs.” These were expressions of the aspiration of an exiled, humiliated people to return to its days of splendor. Zionism saw them as outbursts of national energy that failed, and situated them in its genealogical scroll as embers attesting to an unextinguished aspiration for redemption. At the same time, however, it shunned the messianic flames, seeking to quell them and to mold the “alien fire” into real-world activism. The messianic ardor did not abate, but it remained on the margins.

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Antisemitism presented the Jew as a foreign racial element that exploits the host nation. A Jew is not capable of establishing a state entity of his own. He needs the local national entity: He’s a kind of parasite that settles on the firm trunk of the host nation and draws from it strength and potency, but does not contribute to that nation in the things that matter. A Jew does not work the soil, a Jew does not soil his hands with basic labor. He pursues middle-class professions that require education, knowledge of finance, artistry (which he vests with a foreign character, one that is neither authentic or national). He does not go into battle, and in fact does all he can to evade military service. He does not engage in professions in which danger may lurk: He is not an explorer, he does not settle the wilderness. Money was the subject most closely associated with Jews.

The Jewish inclination to argue over trivialities, not to accept authority, to divide like an amoeba, upended Jewish statehood during both the First and Second Temple periods.

Theodor Herzl and those of his generation hoped that Zionism would recast the image of the Jew from that of a swindler and parasite to a person of honor and courage, a state builder, a settler of barren land. Indeed, the Jews proved that they are capable of working the soil, settling a land and fighting courageously. They demonstrated creativity and persistence, skill and extraordinary devotion, thereby showing the world a new, different Jew: bold, a person of the intellect but also a person of action. But what about the establishment of a sustainable state entity? On the face of it, the state, having already existed for 75 years, has proved that it can withstand crises. But will we cross the 75-year hurdle?

About 10 years ago, at an elegant lunch with historian Rashid Khalidi in the faculty club at Columbia University, following a cordial, civilized conversation, he said to me: “You are like the Crusaders, your end will be to depart from Palestine. It is only a matter of time.” Is this indeed what awaits the Jewish state? The attempts to uproot the Jews from the Land of Israel by force have not succeeded. Where then does the threat to the Jewish state lie?

When the Jewish state was established, the question of its character arose, namely which values and laws would guide it. In 1947, the majority of the Yishuv – the pre-state Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine – was secular, although most of its population came from religiously observant homes. The society had received Jewish religious characteristics, which it processed into national symbols: It was self-evident that the yearly calendar would be the Jewish calendar, with the religious festivals and commemorative dates. The rites of passage – circumcision, bar mitzvah, marriage and burial – were in most cases carried out in the traditional Jewish form. An attempt was made to create, from the religious tradition that had been gleaned at home, a tradition that would be suitable to both the modern era and the new national spirit. In the public space, religious freedom prevailed; those who wished to follow the religious commandments did so, others were at liberty not to uphold them.

Secularism was fitting for the spirit of the time, in which the power of religion was tending to wane across the world. The Haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) were a small, weak minority in Israel. Before World War II, they had been fierce opponents of Zionism. But now, with a Jewish state about to come into existence, they looked for a way to join the Jewish commonalty. David Ben-Gurion wished to present a uniform Jewish front to the United Nations General Assembly on the eve of the partition vote. Accordingly, he signed the status quo agreement, which gave the religious population control over matters of marriage and divorce. The Agudat Yisrael movement, from which only smoldering embers remained after the Holocaust, was granted the right to have 400 yeshiva students, a remnant of the past, exempted from military service. In the spirit of progress, the assessment of Ben-Gurion and his associates was that religion was in regression and that the Haredim were akin to an enclave from the past that would ultimately disappear.

Among the signatories to the Declaration of Independence heralding the state’s establishment were representatives of the religious parties. The document refers to the State of Israel as the state of the Jewish people, but also proclaims the equality of all its citizens and freedom of religion, culture and language. Today the Declaration of Independence is enjoying growing popularity among the protest movements as a document that could serve as the basis for a constitution for Israel. But as early as 1949, the religious population opposed a constitution, which would establish equality between Jews and non-Jews. In the wake of this, agreement was reached to enact over time a series of Basic Laws, which would in time coalesce into a corpus equivalent to a constitution. Was that a historic mistake? If a constitution had been promulgated back then, would the story have been different?

The British Mandate left Israel with a judicial system that served as a basis for the new state, with appropriate adjustments. The large majority of Israel’s population did not come from countries where a democratic regime existed, so that the notions of equality before the law and the supremacy of the law were alien to them. Israelis were more proficient at obeying the law than at protecting individual rights and equality.

The judicial system emerged through a process of trial and error. It wasn’t an orderly process in which the great minds of the nation convened and decided on a legal system, the separation of powers and the relations between the three branches of government, in the way that the American Constitution was framed, or the French constitutions, which were rewritten a number of times. To some extent, Israel resembled Britain, where custom and precedent are a substitute for an orderly constitution.

The dramatic turning point in the country’s history occurred in the wake of the Six-Day War. The territories of all of the Land of Israel, from the sea to the Jordan River, were now accessible to Israelis. Rabbi Shlomo Goren, chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces, sounded the shofar on the Temple Mount, and the ancient Jewish myth was resurrected. The return in 1967 to Judea and Samaria, as the West Bank was now called – the cradle of the Bible, the land of the forefathers – to the stories of Saul and David, thrilled and electrified Israelis, and spawned messianic expectations that it was believed had been overcome by Zionist pragmatism. The public debate over the occupation’s costs – emotional, moral and human – heated up from the moment the war ended.

Turning points and crisis

In 1977, Menachem Begin came to power. His greatest achievement was the Camp David Accords, which led to a stable peace with Egypt, which has held firm ever since. But he did two other things that changed the course of Israeli history, and not for the better. First, he adopted the Gush Emunim movement and its settlement policy, and he helped establish settlements in Judea and Samaria, as the West Bank was now called. The settlements there now began to multiply rapidly, with broad government support. The second thing Begin did was to adopt the Haredi parties and coopt them into the government by accepting their conditions. These included a prohibition on having El Al fly on Shabbat, but more significantly, cancellation of the ceiling that had existed since Israel’s first days on the number of yeshiva students who were exempt from military service.

The truth should be told: The protest is being fueled by the nation’s elites – the economic elite, the military elite, the academic elite.... But ‘elite’ is not a dirty word.

These two actions, which appear to be trivial compared to the achievement of the peace treaty with Egypt, had a long-term effect on Israel’s fate on a scale wholly disproportionate to the small amount of thought that was devoted to them.

What are the turning points that have brought us to the present crisis? Was it the 1982 Lebanon War – the first war fought by Israel without a national consensus, thus generating a rift in internal solidarity? Was it the murder of Emil Grunzweig, an Israeli army officer who returned from Lebanon and was demonstrating with his friends in Jerusalem against the government’s policy? What generated the depth of hatred that could lead an ordinary citizen, with no personal connection to the demonstrators, to decide to throw a fragmentation grenade at them? Yona Avrushmi, the murderer, explained his deed by citing unrelenting wild incitement against the left. The Jewish underground, which operated in the late 1970s and early 1980s against Palestinians, in reprisals for the murder of Jews in Judea and Samaria, slid from perpetrating attacks on West Bank mayors, who could be viewed as inciting Arabs to murder settlers, to attacking students in an Islamic college and attempting to strike at five buses carrying innocent Arab passengers. A rapid process of the erosion of moral inhibitions was underway. Is it this that brought us to disparage humanistic values and to a situation of unbridled nationalist egoism?

Settlement amid a population that doesn’t want the insatiable neighbors who have moved in next door, and who are forced to live with them against their will, is a source of profound moral perversion, the creation of a society that sees itself as the owner of the place by virtue of divine promises made thousands of years ago, and that cannot stand up to a rational test. Never before was self-perception of being the “chosen people” applied so literally as it is in Judea and Samaria. When a religious cabinet minister says that the Temple Mount is the property of the Jewish nation, because King David bought it from Araunah the Jebusite, it sounds like a nutty anecdote, but when the nutty anecdote and others like it become the basis for acts of dispossession and fraud, for shattering the boundaries between permitted and forbidden by virtue of divine license – violence then becomes a conventional norm, incitement a standard form of _expression_, and corruption justified if it benefits the settlement project.

Today we are seeing the routinization of the settlements. There is a constant cat-and-mouse game between the settlers and the army, with the former trying to expand the boundaries of the Jewish settlements, and the army arresting them with one hand and protecting them with the other. What is this leading to? Is there another way to roll the carpet back, or are we on an irreversible track of the emergence of a binational state between the sea and the Jordan? The Jewish state was not established in order to create another reality of Jewish life among non-Jews, but in order to maintain in one corner of the globe a separate Jewish political entity. There are presently some 500,000 settlers in Judea and Samaria. The current government granted far-reaching powers to the settlers’ representative in the government, Bezalel Smotrich, and we can expect a surge in the settlement enterprise and growing brutalization on both sides.

The Haredim are a problem no less severe than the settlers. There are different categories of Haredim: Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, “Lithuanians” and Hasidim. Some of them work for a living, but in the great majority of cases, the wife is the provider while the husband “studies” full-time, or they make do with the government allowance they receive. Today, the ultra-Orthodox constitute 14 percent of Israeli society. They have large families, with an average of six children – and estimates are that within a decade or two, Haredim will constitute the majority of Israeli schoolchildren.

Most of the Haredi men who work are in the teaching profession. The women hold more lucrative jobs. Now, with the “fully right-wing” government, which includes the most extreme streams of religious society, the government’s generosity relieves most of them of the need to acquire a general education. There are poor Haredi cities, all of whose residents are ignorant of all the practical knowledge that is taken for granted in the modern world. They have difficulty finding well-paying jobs in the labor market, because they lack the requisite education. They don’t serve in the army, and their material contribution to the country is minuscule: Because their income is low, they don’t pay taxes, and they effectively subsist on the state’s support.

In the state’s early decades, the Haredim had one positive trait: They were politically moderate, a remnant from the Diaspora, where Jews made efforts not to rile the goyim. Those days are past. They are now a racist population, for the most part, who are contemptuous of anyone who doesn’t study Torah as they do. Their attitudes toward women, LGBTQ people and Arabs reveal a sensibility that is both racist and discriminatory.

The crisis in Israel today revolves on the axis of religious vs. secular, messianists vs. democrats. This is the first time in Israel’s history that there has been a monolithic government, one that incorporates the most extreme national and religious fringes, has no moderating elements, and in which the prime minister is dependent on every fragment of an extreme party and does all he can to placate it so that his government will not fall apart. The justice minister is occupying the country with an attempt to enact a series of legal reforms that, if passed, will mean the loss of the judicial branch’s independence and the subordination of the legislative branch to the executive branch. These “reforms” are aimed at validating corruption, preventing the courts from intervening in cases of infringement of human rights and at effectively eliminating the equality of the country’s citizens before the law. The only mitigating factor in this hallucinatory situation is the protest movement, which is bringing out more people over a longer period than any similar movement in Israel’s history.

Assuredly, Israel’s young people love the country and want to live here, are even ready to lay down their life for it. But if the country doesn’t want them, they will not stay.

In the face of the protest, the right wing is carrying out a campaign of incitement and hatred. When pilots announced that if the legislation passes they will not report for reserve duty – which they do on a voluntary basis almost every week – beyond what is required by law, they were immediately accused of treason by the right wing’s propaganda machine. A Haredi minister, apparently lacking any vestige of self-awareness, complained that not doing reserve duty because you don’t like the government’s policy is really going too far.

Aharon Barak, the former Supreme Court president, and a jurist of worldwide repute, someone who played a very important role in the Camp David talks that led to the signing of the peace treaty with Egypt, has been demonized by the hate propaganda. The 86-year-old Holocaust survivor was accused of every possible misdeed by right-wing demonstrators who gathered outside his modest Tel Aviv home, even though he has long been out of public employ. Thanks to the right wing’s political clout, their inflammatory rhetoric and the fake news they spout already dominates a television channel, and is now taking over the widely heard Army Radio as well. In addition to the media, the right is trying to seize control of higher education and the civil service as well.

A protest of elites
When coalition members saw the momentum of the legislation slowed down in the face of the protest movement, representatives of the Religious Zionism party sounded the argument (which immediately became a propaganda theme): We won the election, so why can’t we do what we want? You call this democracy?

In this regard, the truth should be told: The protest is being fueled by the nation’s elites – the economic elite, the military elite, the academic elite. When the people from high-tech, the pilots and all the former heads of the Shin Bet security service and the Mossad, former governors of the Bank of Israel and most of the country’s economics and science professors join together in opposing what is known euphemistically as the “judicial reform,” when investments from abroad are halted, and there’s concern about Israel’s credit rating being downgraded – what we see are effects of strength that is not quantitative but qualitative.

But “elite” is not a dirty word. A country cannot exist without elites. In the weekly mass demonstrations that have been ongoing for more than half a year, a large measure of popular strength is also visible. A young generation is arising in order to protect its future and that of its children. Democracy is not only a majority of voters for the Knesset, it is also the rights of a large minority that pays most of the taxes in the country, whose members risk their lives in long, demanding army service, that bears the burden of sustaining the country’s existence in all the critical facets.

The struggle is over the character of Israeli democracy now and in the future. Is it to be a majoritarian democracy in which the majority decides and the minority finds itself deprived, or will it be a liberal democracy in which everyone has equal rights, and in which the state budget is divided so that the rights of secular citizens are protected, the Arabs receive a slice of the budget that is proportional to their share in the population, and in which the ultra-Orthodox are not exempted of responsibility but are required to contribute their share to the country’s economy?

When Chaim Weizmann started to conduct negotiations with Lord Balfour, the British foreign secretary, over what would become known as the Balfour Declaration, his interlocutor asked him what he meant by a “Jewish state.” Implicit in the question was apprehension about a theocracy, about which the enemies of Zionism had warned. Weizmann replied: It will be a Jewish state the way England is English. The reply was precise. There is no separation between religion and state in England, of the sort that exists in France or the United States. The state church is Anglican. The national symbols are the British ones: the monarchy, the flag, the national anthem, the ceremonies. But the state grants equality under the law to all its citizens, and legally there is no discrimination on grounds of religion, language or race. Equality before the law requires an independent judiciary. That was Israel’s situation until the present government rose up against it to eviscerate it. That is the meaning of “Jewish and democratic.”

Will we succeed in preventing an overhaul of the character of Israeli democracy? Israel’s governments until the present one were careful not to be of one hue. The diversity reflected the deep understanding that in order to maintain a state, it’s necessary to preserve a balance between Israeli society’s different components. Now, for the first time, that understanding has been shattered. The extremist, messianic elements see in this government an opportunity to impose a theocratic and essentially fascist regime, one that will give the settlers in Judea and Samaria a free hand and that exploits the state’s coffers for the benefit of the settlers on the one hand, and the Haredim on the other.

If the government succeeds in carrying out its nefarious intentions, the national rift will lead to the emigration of educated young Israelis. It won’t happen over a day or two; but in response to a process in which the state becomes more religious, more extremist, more isolated from the Western world, the younger generation will look for a different future. Assuredly, Israel’s young people love the country and want to live here, are even ready to lay down their life for it. But if the country doesn’t want them, they will not stay. Suffice it to have a few tens of thousands of young people from the elites leave – the Israel Defense Forces will not survive the brain drain, and those across the borders are watching what happens here closely.

The historian Josephus describes how the Zealots burned the storerooms of food during the Roman siege of Jerusalem. Are those correct who refer to the present coalition as the “government of the destruction of the ‘Third Temple’”? Have the Jews not developed the gene for statehood, the necessary wisdom to find the compromise, so that again we are watching the unfolding of a historic drama in which the extremists take over and annihilate everything their predecessors built?

Rashid Khalidi was wrong: We are not the Crusaders and we do not intend to abandon this corner of the globe for which we abided with love. But doubt gnaws at us: Will we learn from the past? Will we draw lessons from our history? Or will we again bemoan a transgression: “Because of our sins we were exiled from our land”?
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Prof. Anita Shapira is winner of the Israel Prize for the History of the Jewish People. An expanded version of this article will appear later this year in the journal Liberties, edited by Leon Wieseltier.